Allen Ginsberg

Adrian Mitchell
Adrian Mitchell FRSL (24 October 1932 – 20 December 2008) was an English poet, novelist and playwright. A former journalist, he became a noted figure on the British anti-authoritarian Left. For almost half a century he was the foremost poet of the country's anti-Bomb movement. The critic Kenneth Tynan called him the British Mayakovsky.
Mitchell sought in his work to counteract the implications of his own assertion that, "Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people."
In a National Poetry Day poll in 2005 his poem "Human Beings" was voted the one most people would like to see launched into space. In 2002 he was nominated, semi-seriously, Britain's Shadow Poet Laureate. Mitchell was for some years poetry editor of the New Statesman, and was the first to publish an interview with The Beatles. His work for the Royal Shakespeare Company included Peter Brook's US and the English version of Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade.
Ever inspired by the example of his own favourite poet and precursor William Blake, about whom he wrote the acclaimed Tyger for the National Theatre, his often angry output swirled from anarchistic anti-war satire, through love poetry to, increasingly, stories and poems for children. He also wrote librettos. The Poetry Archive identified his creative yield as hugely prolific.

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Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Cecile Rich (May 16, 1929 – March 27, 2012) was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse."
Her first collection of poetry, A Change of World, was selected by the senior poet W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award; she went on to write the introduction to the published volume. Rich famously declined the National Medal of Arts, protesting the United States House of Representatives and Speaker Gingrich's vote to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.
Adrienne Rich was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the older of two sisters. Her father, the renowned pathologist Arnold Rice Rich, was the Chairman of Pathology at The Johns Hopkins Medical School, and her mother, Helen Elizabeth (Jones) Rich, was a concert pianist (before she married) and a composer. Her father was from a Jewish family, and her mother was Southern Protestant; the girls were raised as Christians. Adrienne Rich's early poetic influence stemmed from her father who encouraged her to read but also to write her own poetry. Her interest in literature was sparked within her father's library where she read the work of writers such as Ibsen,Arnold, Blake, Keats, Rossetti, and Tennyson. Her father was ambitious for Adrienne and "planned to create a prodigy." Adrienne Rich and her younger sister were home schooled by their mother until Adrienne began public education in the fourth grade. The poems Sources and After Dark document her relationship with her father, describing how she worked hard to fulfill her parents' ambitions for her—moving into a world in which she was expected to excel.

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Adunis
Ali Ahmad Said Esber (Arabic: علي أحمد سعيد إسبر‎; transliterated: alî ahmadi sa'îdi asbar or Ali Ahmad Sa'id; born 1 January 1930), also known by the pen name Adonis or Adunis (Arabic: أدونيس), is a Syrian poet and essayist. He has written more than twenty books in Arabic language.
Imprisoned in Syria in the mid-1950s as a result of his beliefs, Adunis settled abroad and has made his career largely in Lebanon and France. A perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, he has been regularly nominated for the award since 1988 and has been described as the greatest living poet of the Arab world.
Ali Ahmad Said Asbar was born in Al Qassabin, Latakia, in Northern Syria, to an Alawite family. From an early age, he worked in the fields, but his father regularly had him memorise poetry, and he began to compose poems of his own. In 1947, he had the opportunity to recite a poem for Syrian president Shukri al-Kuwatli; that led to a series of scholarships, first to a school in Latakia and then to the Syrian University in Damascus, where he received a degree in Philosophy in 1954.

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Alan Watts
Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. Pursuing a career, he attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, where he received a master's degree in theology. Watts became an Episcopal priest but left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies.
Living on the West Coast, Watts gained a large following in the San Francisco Bay Area while working as a volunteer programmer at KPFA, a Pacifica Radio station in Berkeley. Watts wrote more than 25 books and articles on subjects important to Eastern and Western religion, introducing the then-burgeoning youth culture to The Way of Zen (1957), one of the first bestselling books on Buddhism. In Psychotherapy East and West (1961), Watts proposed that Buddhism could be thought of as a form of psychotherapy and not just a religion. Like Aldous Huxley before him, he explored human consciousness in the essay, "The New Alchemy" (1958), and in the book, The Joyous Cosmology (1962).

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Alexander Trocchi
Alexander Whitelaw Robertson Trocchi (30 July 1925 – 15 April 1984) was a Scottish novelist.
Trocchi was born in Glasgow to a Scottish mother and Italian father. After working as a seaman on the Murmansk convoys, he attended University of Glasgow. On graduation he obtained a traveling grant that enabled him to relocate to continental Europe. In the early 1950s, he lived in Paris and edited the literary magazine Merlin, which published Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Christopher Logue, and Pablo Neruda, amongst others. Although not published in Merlin, American writer Terry Southern, who lived in Paris from 1948−1952, became a close friend of both Trocchi and his colleague Richard Seaver, and the three later co-edited the anthology Writers In Revolt (1962). Though established somewhat in rivalry with the Paris Review, George Plimpton also had served on Merlin's editorial board. Trocchi claimed that this journal came to an end when the US State Department canceled its many subscriptions in protest over an article by Jean-Paul Sartre praising the homoeroticism of Jean Genet.

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Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg (

/ˈɡɪnzbərɡ/; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression. Ginsberg is best known for his epic poem "Howl", in which he celebrated his fellow "angel-headed hipsters" and harshly denounced what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States. This poem is one of the classic poems of the Beat Generation. The poem, which was dedicated to writer Carl Solomon, opens:
madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix...</poem> In October 1955, Ginsberg and five other unknown poets gave a free reading at an experimental art gallery in San Francisco. Ginsberg's "Howl" electrified the audience. According to fellow poet Michael McClure, it was clear "that a barrier had been broken, that a human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America and its supporting armies and navies and academies and institutions and ownership systems and power support bases." In 1957, "Howl" attracted widespread publicity when it became the subject of an obscenity trial in which a San Francisco prosecutor argued it contained "filthy, vulgar, obscene, and disgusting language." The poem seemed especially outrageous in 1950s America because it depicted both heterosexual and homosexual sex at a time when sodomy laws made homosexual acts a crime in every U.S. state. "Howl" reflected Ginsberg's own homosexuality and his relationships with a number of men, including Peter Orlovsky, his lifelong partner. Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that "Howl" was not obscene, adding, "Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemisms?"

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Amiri Baraka
Amiri Baraka (born October 7, 1934), formerly known as LeRoi Jones, is an American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays, and music criticism. He is the author of numerous books of poetry and has taught at a number of universities, including the State University of New York at Buffalo and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Baraka was born Everett LeRoi Jones in Newark, New Jersey, where he attended Barringer High School. His father, Coyt Leverette Jones, worked as a postal supervisor and lift operator. His mother, Anna Lois (née Russ), was a social worker. In 1967, he adopted the Muslim name Imamu Amear Baraka, which he later changed to Amiri Baraka.
He won a scholarship to Rutgers University in 1951, but a continuing sense of cultural dislocation prompted him to transfer in 1952 to Howard University, which he left without obtaining a degree. His major fields of study were philosophy and religion. Baraka subsequently studied at Columbia University and the New School for Social Research without obtaining a degree.

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Andrei Voznesensky
Andrei Andreyevich Voznesensky (Russian: Андре́й Андре́евич Вознесе́нский, May 12, 1933 – June 1, 2010) was a Soviet and Russian poet and writer who had been referred to by Robert Lowell as "one of the greatest living poets in any language." He was one of the "Children of the '60s," a new wave of iconic Russian intellectuals led by the Khrushchev Thaw.
Voznesensky was considered "one of the most daring writers of the Soviet era" but his style often led to regular criticism from his contemporaries and he was once threatened with expulsion by Nikita Khrushchev. He performed poetry readings in front of sold-out stadiums around the world, and was much admired for his skilled delivery. Some of his poetry was translated into English by W. H. Auden. Voznesenky's long-serving mentor and muse was Boris Pasternak, the Nobel Laureate and the author of Doctor Zhivago.
Before his death, he was both critically and popularly proclaimed "a living classic", and "an icon of Soviet intellectuals".
Voznesensky was born in Moscow. His father was a professor of engineering, while his mother influenced him early on by reading poetry in his presence. His father worked during World War II. In his early life, Voznesensky was fascinated with painting and architecture, in 1957 graduating from the Moscow Architectural Institute with a degree in engineering. His enthusiasm for poetry, though, proved to be stronger. While still a teenager, he sent his poems to Boris Pasternak; the friendship between the two had a strong influence on the young poet, and he later described this relationship in "I Am Fourteen" – "From that day on, my life took on a magical meaning and a sense of destiny; his new poetry, telephone conversations, Sunday chats at his house from 2 to 4, walks—years of happiness and childish adoration". Pasternak, who died in 1960, paid him the ultimate tribute – "Your entrance into literature was swift and turbulent. I am glad I've lived to see it".

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André Breton
André Breton (French pronunciation: [ɑ̃dʁe bʁətɔ̃]; 19 February 1896 – 28 September 1966) was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto (Manifeste du surréalisme) of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism".
Born to a family of modest means in Tinchebray (Orne) in Normandy, he studied medicine and psychiatry. During World War I he worked in a neurological ward in Nantes, where he met the devotee of Alfred Jarry, Jacques Vaché, whose anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition influenced Breton considerably. Vaché committed suicide at age 24, and his war-time letters to Breton and others were published in a volume entitled Lettres de guerre (1919), for which Breton wrote four introductory essays.
Breton married his first wife, Simone Kahn, on 15 September 1921. The couple relocated to rue Fontaine # 42 in Paris on 1 January 1922. The apartment on rue Fontaine became home to Breton's collection of more than 5,300 items: modern paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, books, art catalogs, journals, manuscripts, and works of popular and Oceanic art.

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Anne Waldman
Anne Waldman (born April 2, 1945) is an American poet. Since the 1960s, Waldman has been an active member of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community as a writer, performer, collaborator, professor, editor, scholar, and cultural/political activist.
Born in Millville, New Jersey, Waldman only lived in New Jersey very briefly. She was raised on MacDougal Street in New York City's Greenwich Village, and received her B.A. from Bennington College in 1966. During the 1960s, Waldman became part of the East Coast poetry scene, in part through her engagement with the poets and artists loosely termed the Second Generation of the New York School. During this time, Waldman also made many connections with earlier generations of poets, including figures such as Allen Ginsberg, who once called Waldman his "spiritual wife." From 1966-1968, she served as Assistant Director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's; and, from 1968–1978, she served as the Project's Director.
In the early 1960s, Waldman became a student of Buddhism. In the 1970s, along with Allen Ginsberg, she began to study with the Tibetan Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. In 1974, with Trungpa, Ginsberg, and others, Waldman founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado (now Naropa University), where she remains a Distinguished Professor of Poetics and the Director of Naropa's famous Summer Writing Program.

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Anselm Hollo
Anselm Paul Alexis Hollo (born April 12, 1934 in Helsinki) is a Finnish poet and translator. He has lived in the United States since 1967.
Paavo Anselm Aleksis Hollo was born in Finland. His father, Juho Aukusti Hollo (1885–1967) — who liked to be known as "J. A." Hollo — was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Helsinki, an essayist, and a major translator of literature into Finnish. His mother was Iris Antonina Anna Walden, a music teacher and daughter of organic chemist Paul Walden. He lived for eight years in the United Kingdom producing three children: Hannes, Kaarina, and Tamsin, with his first wife, poet Josephine Clare. He has been a permanent resident in the United States since the late 1960s, and now lives in Boulder, Colorado with his wife, artist Jane Dalrymple-Hollo.
He has published more than forty titles of poetry in the UK and in the US, in a style strongly influenced by the American beat poets.
In 1965, he performed at the "underground" International Poetry Incarnation, London. In 2001, poets and critics associated with the SUNY Buffalo POETICS list elected Hollo to the honorary position of "anti-laureate", in protest at the appointment of Billy Collins to the position of Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

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Arthur Rimbaud
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud (/ræmˈboʊ/ or /ˈræmboʊ/; French pronunciation: [aʁtyʁ ʁɛ̃bo]; 20 October 1854 – 10 November 1891) was a French poet. Born in Charleville, Ardennes, he produced his best known works while still in his late teens—Victor Hugo described him at the time as "an infant Shakespeare"—and he gave up creative writing altogether before the age of 20. As part of the decadent movement, Rimbaud influenced modern literature, music and art. He was known to have been a libertine and a restless soul, travelling extensively on three continents before his death from cancer just after his 37th birthday.
Arthur Rimbaud was born into the provincial middle class of Charleville (now part of Charleville-Mézières) in the Ardennes département in northeastern France. He was the second child of a career soldier, Frédéric Rimbaud, and his wife Marie-Catherine-Vitalie Cuif. His father, a Burgundian of Provençal extraction, rose from a simple recruit to the rank of captain, and spent the greater part of his army years in foreign service. Captain Rimbaud fought in the conquest of Algeria and was awarded the Légion d'honneur. The Cuif family was a solidly established Ardennais family, but they were plagued by unstable and bohemian characters; two of Arthur Rimbaud's uncles from his mother's side were alcoholics.

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Artur Lundkvist
Artur Lundkvist (3 March 1906 in Perstorp Municipality, Skåne County – 11 December 1991 in Solna, Stockholm County) was a Swedish writer, poet and literary critic. He was a member of the Swedish Academy from 1968.
He wrote around 80 books, and his works have been translated into some 30 languages. Lundkvist published a number of poems, including Om natten (In The Night). He is also noted for having translated many works from Spanish and French into Swedish. Several authors he translated were later awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
He married the poet Maria Wine in 1936.
During the Cold War, Lundkvist was an adherent of the so called "third stance" (Swedish: tredje ståndpunkten) in Swedish public debate, which advocated a neutral stance in the conflict between the two superpowers. Despite this, he served on the board of the pro-communist Sweden-GDR Association. He was also a member of the Swedish Peace Committee, the Swedish section of the World Peace Council. In 1958 he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize from the Soviet Union.

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Bengali people
The Bengali people are an ethnic community native to the historic region of Bengal (now divided between Bangladesh and India) in South Asia. They speak Bengali (বাংলা Bangla), which is an Indo-Aryan language of the eastern Indian subcontinent, evolved from the Magadhi Prakrit and Sanskrit languages. In their native language, they are referred to as বাঙালী (pronounced Bangali). They primarily belong to Indo-Aryan and Mongolo-Dravidian stock,and are closely related to Austro-Asiatic, Dravidian, Assamese, Sinhalese, Munda, and Tibeto-Burman linguistic/ethnic stocks. As such, Bengalis are a homogeneous but considerably diverse ethnic group with heterogeneous origins. They are the second largest single ethnic group in the world^{[citation needed]}.
They are mostly concentrated in Bangladesh and the states of West Bengal and Tripura in India. There are also a number of Bengali communities scattered across North-East India, New Delhi, and the Indian states of Assam, Jharkhand, Bihar, Maharastra, Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Orissa. In addition, there are significant Bengali communities beyond South Asia; some of the most well established Bengali communities are in the United Kingdom and United States. Large numbers of Bengalis (mainly from Sylhet) have settled in Britain, mainly living in the East boroughs of London, numbering from around 300,000; in the USA there are about 150,000 living across the country, mainly in New York. There are also millions living across the Gulf States, majority of whom are living as foreign workers. There are also many Bengalis in Pakistan, Malaysia, South Korea, Canada, Japan, Australia and many other countries (see Bangladeshi diaspora).

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Blaže Koneski
Blaže Koneski (Macedonian: Блаже Конески) (December 19, 1921 – December 7, 1993) (born in Nebregovo, near Prilep, Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, now Republic of Macedonia) was one of the most distinguished Macedonian poets, writers, literary translators, and linguistic scholars. His major contributions are in the codification of standard Macedonian.
He received Royal Serbian scholarship to study in the Kragujevac gymnasium (high school). Later, he studied medicine at the University of Belgrade, and then changed to Serbian language and literature. After the graduation, he worked as a lector in the Macedonian National Theater, and in 1946 he joined the faculty at the Philosophy Department of the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje, where he worked until his retirement.
He was a member of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts since 1967, and was elected its president in 1967 - 1975. Koneski was also a member of the Zagreb (Croatia), Belgrade (Serbia), Ljubljana (Slovenia) and Łódź (Poland) Academies of Sciences and Arts, and honorary doctor of the Universities of Chicago, United States, and Kraków in Poland.

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Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan (

/ˈdɪlən/), born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, is an American singer-songwriter, musician and artist. He has been an influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly reluctant figurehead of social unrest. A number of Dylan's early songs, such as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'", became anthems for the US civil rights and anti-war movements. Leaving his initial base in the culture of folk music behind, Dylan's six-minute single "Like a Rolling Stone" has been described as radically altering the parameters of popular music in 1965. However, his recordings employing electric instruments attracted denunciation and criticism from others in the folk movement.
Dylan's lyrics incorporated a variety of political, social, philosophical, and literary influences. They defied existing pop music conventions and appealed hugely to the then burgeoning counterculture. Initially inspired by the songs of Woody Guthrie,Robert Johnson, and Hank Williams, as well as the music and performance styles of Buddy Holly and Little Richard, Dylan has both amplified and personalized musical genres. His recording career, spanning fifty years, has explored numerous distinct traditions in American song—from folk, blues and country to gospel, rock and roll, and rockabilly to English, Scottish, and Irish folk music, embracing even jazz and swing.

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Bob Kaufman
Bob Kaufman (April 18, 1925 – January 12, 1986), born Robert Garnell Kaufman, was an American Beat poet and surrealist inspired by jazz music. In France, where his poetry had a large following, he was known as the "American Rimbaud."
NOTE: B.K. is not known, in France, as the "American Rimbaud;" he's known as "Rimbaud Noir" (i.e. the "Black Rimbaud")
Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, Kaufman was one of fourteen children. He claimed to be the son of a German-Jewish father and a Roman Catholic Black mother from Martinique, and that his grandmother practiced voodoo. At age eighteen, Kaufman joined the United States Merchant Marine, which he left in the early 1940s to briefly study literature at New York's The New School. There, he met William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. In 1944 Bob Kaufman married Ida Berrocal. They had one daughter, Antoinette Victoria Marie (Nagle), born in New York City in 1945 (died 2008). Kaufman moved to San Francisco's North Beach in 1958 and remained there for most of the rest of his life. He married Eileen Singe in 1958; they had one child, Parker, named for Charlie Parker.

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Bulat Okudzhava
Bulat Shalvovich Okudzhava (also transliterated as Boulat Okudjava, Okoudjava, or Okoudzhava; Russian: Була́т Ша́лвович Окуджа́ва, Georgian: ბულატ ოკუჯავა) (May 9, 1924 – June 12, 1997) was a Soviet and Russian poet, writer, musician, novelist, and singer-songwriter. He was one of the founders of the Russian genre called "author song" (авторская песня, avtorskaya pesnya). He was born in Moscow and died in Paris. He was the author of about 200 songs, set to his own poetry. His songs are a mixture of Russian poetic and folksong traditions and the French chansonnier style represented by such contemporaries of Okudzhava as Georges Brassens. Though his songs were never overtly political (in contrast to those of some of his fellow bards), the freshness and independence of Okudzhava's artistic voice presented a subtle challenge to Soviet cultural authorities, who were thus hesitant for many years to give official sanction to Okudzhava as a singer-songwriter.
Bulat Okudzhava was born in Moscow on May 9, 1924 into a family of communists who had come from Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, to study and to work for the Communist Party. The son of a Georgian father, Shalva Okudzhava, and an Armenian mother, Ashkhen Nalbandyan, Bulat Okudzhava spoke and wrote only in Russian. This was because his mother, who spoke Armenian, Georgian, and Azerbaijani, had always requested everyone who came to visit her house to "Please, speak the language of Lenin - Russian."^{[citation needed]} Okudzava's mother, was the niece of a well-known Armenian poet, Vahan Terian. His father, a high-ranking Communist Party member from Georgia, was arrested in 1937 during the Great Purge and executed as a German spy on the basis of a false accusation. His mother was also arrested and spent 18 years in the prison camps of the Gulag (1937–1955). Bulat Okudzhava returned to Tbilisi and lived there with relatives.

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Carl Solomon
Carl Solomon (March 30, 1928–1993) was an American writer.
Solomon was born in the Bronx of New York City. His father's death in 1939 had a profoundly negative effect on his early life. Solomon later said of the time, "I drifted into indiscipline and intellectual adventure that eventually became complete confusion."^{[citation needed]} Graduating high school by age fifteen, Solomon then went onto the City College of New York for a short time before joining the United States Marines in 1944. In his travels overseas, Solomon became exposed to Surrealism and Dada, ideas that would inspire him throughout his life. In Paris, he witnessed Antonin Artaud give a screaming poetry reading—this so impressed him that he would remain a disciple of Artaud for much of his life. It was shortly after this period that Carl Solomon was voluntarily institutionalized, a gesture he made as a Dadaist symbol of defeat.
It was in the mental hospital in New York State that he met Allen Ginsberg, who was there as an alternative to jail for confused involvement in some petty thefts. It was through Ginsberg that Solomon would gain his fame. Ginsberg later dedicated his poem "Howl" to Solomon, the third section of the poem addressed to Solomon by name. It uses the phrase "I'm with you in Rockland" as a refrain to each line in that section. The first section of the poem immortalizes a few of Solomon's personal exploits, such as the line, "...who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy."

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Charlie Parker
Charles Parker, Jr. (August 29, 1920 – March 12, 1955), also known as Yardbird and Bird, was an American jazz saxophonist and composer.
Parker acquired the nickname "Yardbird" early in his career and the shortened form, "Bird", which continued to be used for the rest of his life, inspiring the titles of a number of Parker compositions, such as "Yardbird Suite", "Ornithology", "Bird Gets the Worm", and "Bird of Paradise."
Parker was a highly influential jazz soloist and a leading figure in the development of bebop, a form of jazz characterized by fast tempos, virtuosic technique, and improvisation. Parker introduced revolutionary harmonic ideas, including rapidly passing chords, new variants of altered chords, and chord substitutions. His tone ranged from clean and penetrating to sweet and somber. Many Parker recordings demonstrate virtuosic technique and complex melodic lines, combining jazz with other musical genres, including blues, Latin, and classical.
Parker was an icon for the hipster subculture and later the Beat Generation, personifying the jazz musician as an uncompromising artist and intellectual, rather than an entertainer.

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Christopher Logue
Christopher Logue, CBE (23 November 1926 – 2 December 2011) was an English poet associated with the British Poetry Revival.
Born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, and brought up in the Portsmouth area, he was the only child of middle-aged parents, John and Molly Logue, who married late. He attended Roman Catholic schools, including Prior Park College, before going to Portsmouth Grammar School. On call-up, he enlisted in the Black Watch, and was posted to Palestine. He was court-martialled in 1945 over a scheme to sell stolen pay books, and sentenced to 16 months imprisonment, served partly in Acre Prison. He lived in Paris from 1951 to 1956, and was a friend of Alexander Trocchi.
In 1958 he joined the first Aldermaston march, organised by the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War. He was on the Committee of 100. He served a month in jail for refusing to be bound over not to continue with the celebrated 17 September 1961 Parliament Square sit-down. He told the Bow Street magistrate, "I came here to save your life. But, having heard what you have to say, I don't think the end justifies the means." In Drake Hall open prison he and fellow protesters were set to work - "Some wit allocated it" - demolishing a munitions factory.

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Chögyam Trungpa
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (Wylie: Chos rgyam Drung pa; February 28, 1939 – April 4, 1987) was a Buddhist meditation master and holder of both the Kagyu and Nyingma lineages, the eleventh Trungpa tülku, a tertön, supreme abbot of the Surmang monasteries, scholar, teacher, poet, artist, and originator of a radical re-presentation of Shambhala vision.
Recognized both by Tibetan Buddhists and by other spiritual practitioners and scholars as a preeminent teacher of Tibetan Buddhism, he was a major, albeit controversial, figure in the dissemination of Tibetan Buddhism to the West, founding Vajradhatu and Naropa University and establishing the Shambhala Training method.
Among his contributions are the translation of a large number of Tibetan texts, the introduction of the Vajrayana teachings to the West, and a presentation of the Buddhadharma largely devoid of ethnic trappings. Regarded as a mahasiddha by many senior lamas, he is seen as having embodied the crazy wisdom (Tib. yeshe chölwa) tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. Some of his teaching methods and actions were the topic of controversy during his lifetime and afterwards.

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David Amram
David Amram (born November 17, 1930) is an American composer, musician, conductor, and writer. As a classical composer and performer, his integration of jazz (including being one of the first noted as an improvising jazz French hornist), ethnic and folk music has led him to work with the likes of Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Willie Nelson, Langston Hughes, Charles Mingus, Pepper Adams, Leonard Bernstein, Sir James Galway, Tito Puente, Mary Lou Williams, Joseph Papp, Arthur Miller, Miles Davis, Arturo Sandoval, Stan Getz, Pete Seeger, Elia Kazan, Odetta, Lord Buckley, Dustin Hoffman, Steve Allen, Machito, Earl "Fatha" Hines, Allen Ginsberg, Nina Simone, Gregory Corso, Bob Dylan, Steve Goodman, Hunter Thompson, Johnny Depp and Jack Kerouac throughout the course of his career.
David Amram has composed more than 100 orchestral and chamber music works, written many scores for Broadway theater and film, including the scores for the films Splendor in the Grass and The Manchurian Candidate; two operas, including the Holocaust opera, The Final Ingredient, a comic opera Twelfth Night with a libretto by Joseph Papp; and the score for the 1959 film Pull My Daisy, narrated by novelist Jack Kerouac. He is also the author of three books, Vibrations, an autobiography, Offbeat: Collaborating With Kerouac, a memoir, and Upbeat: Nine Lives of a Musical Cat, all published by Paradigm Publishers.

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David Szatmary
David P. Szatmary (born May 27, 1951) is an educator, author on various subjects, and an educational entrepreneur.
Born in Milwaukee, Szatmary earned a baccalaureate degree from Marquette University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in American history from Rutgers University. In 1970-1980, he taught in the History Department at the University of Arizona as an Assistant Professor. Based upon his academic work, he published Shays' Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection (University of Massachusetts, 1980), which remains in print. He consulted on the Calliope production of the movie Shays' Rebellion, and more recently was featured in a History Channel program about the rebellion and its importance to the formation of the U.S. Constitution.
From 1980 to 1984, Szatmary managed a chain of music stores in Washington and California, helping to grow the business from three stores in Washington to ten stores on the West Coast. Combining his history expertise with his experience in the music business, he wrote Rockin’ In Time: A Social History of Rock and Roll, published by Prentice-Hall, now in its seventh edition. He also wrote A Time to Rock (Schirmer, 1985) and taught classes at the University of Washington and University of Arizona on the same topic. In addition, he has authored more than 300 reviews of music and history books for publications such as Library Journal and contributed to multiple editions of All-Music Guide (Scott Foresman, first published in 1992).

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Denise Levertov
Denise Levertov (October 24, 1923 – December 20, 1997) was a British-born American poet.
Levertov was born and grew up in Ilford, Essex. Her mother, Beatrice Adelaide (Spooner-Jones) Levertoff, came from a small mining village in North Wales. Her father, Paul Levertoff, had been a teacher at Leipzig University and as a Russian Hassidic Jew was held under house arrest during the First World War as an 'enemy alien' by virtue of his ethnicity. He emigrated to the UK and became an Anglican priest after converting to Christianity. In the mistaken belief that he would want to preach in a Jewish neighbourhood, he was housed in Ilford, within reach of a parish in Shoreditch, in East London. She wrote "My father's Hasidic ancestry, his being steeped in Jewish and Christian scholarship and mysticism, his fervour and eloquence as a preacher, were factors built into my cells". Levertov, who was educated at home, showed an enthusiasm for writing from an early age and studied ballet, art, Piano and French as well as standard subjects. She wrote about the strangeness she felt growing up part Jewish, German, Welsh and English, but not fully belonging to any of these identities. She notes that it lent her a sense of being special rather than excluded: "[I knew] before I was ten that I was an artist-person and I had a destiny". She noted: "Humanitarian politics came early into my life: seeing my father on a soapbox protesting Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia; my father and sister both on soap-boxes protesting Britain's lack of support for Spain; my mother canvasing long before those events for the League of Nations Union; and all three of them working on behalf of the German and Austrian refugees from 1933 onwards… I used to sell the Daily Worker house-to-house in the working class streets of Ilford Lane".

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Desanka Maksimović
Desanka Maksimović (Serbian Cyrillic: Десанка Максимовић, pronounced [dě̞saːŋka mâksimo̞ʋit͡ɕ]) (May 16, 1898 – February 11, 1993) was a Serbian poet, professor of literature, and a member of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Maksimović was born on May 16, 1898 in Rabrovica, near Valjevo, the oldest child of father Mihailo, a teacher, and mother Draginja. Right after her birth, her father was transferred, and they moved to Brankovina, where Desanka spent her childhood. She graduated from the gymnasium in Valjevo and the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy.
In August 1933 she married Sergij Slastikov, but they had no children of their own. Maksimović was a professor of Serbian language from 1923 until 1953 in several schools. First, she was a teacher at the Obrenovac gymnasium, then she moved to the Third Female Gymnasium in Belgrade. Eventually, she was transferred to the teachers' school in Dubrovnik, where she spent one year. After that, she worked in First female gymnasium in Belgrade. One of her best students was Mira Alečković, who also became a poet and a close friend of Desanka Maksimović.

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Dylan Thomas
Dylan Marlais Thomas (27 October 1914 – 9 November 1953) was a Welsh poet and writer who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself. His public readings, particularly in America, won him great acclaim; his sonorous voice with a subtle Welsh lilt became almost as famous as his works. His best-known works include the "play for voices" Under Milk Wood and the celebrated villanelle for his dying father, "Do not go gentle into that good night". Appreciative critics have also noted the craftsmanship and compression of poems such as "In my Craft or Sullen Art", and the rhapsodic lyricism in "And death shall have no dominion" and "Fern Hill".
Dylan Thomas was born in the Uplands area of Swansea, Glamorgan, Wales, on 27 October 1914 just a few months after the Thomas family had bought the house. Uplands was, and still is, one of the more affluent areas of the city.
His father, David John Thomas (1876–1952), had attained a first-class honours degree in English at University College, Aberystwyth, and was dissatisfied with his position at the local grammar school as an English master who taught English literature. His mother, Florence Hannah Thomas (née Williams) (1882–1958), was a seamstress born in Swansea. Nancy, Thomas's sister, (Nancy Marles 1906–1953) was nine years older than he. Their father brought up both children to speak only English, even though he and his wife were both bilingual in English and Welsh. David was even known to give Welsh lessons at home.

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Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (born Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.
He was born as Edgar Poe in Boston, Massachusetts; he was orphaned young when his mother died shortly after his father abandoned the family. Poe was taken in by John and Frances Allan, of Richmond, Virginia, but they never formally adopted him. He attended the University of Virginia for one semester but left due to lack of money. After enlisting in the Army and later failing as an officer's cadet at West Point, Poe parted ways with the Allans. His publishing career began humbly, with an anonymous collection of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), credited only to "a Bostonian".

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Edoardo Sanguineti
Edoardo Sanguineti (9 December 1930 – 18 May 2010) was an Italian writer who was born in Genoa.
During the 1960s he was a leader of the neo avant-garde Gruppo 63 movement, founded in 1963 at Solunto.
He was also an active translator of Joyce, Molière, Shakespeare, Bertolt Brecht, and select Greek and Latin authors.
From 1979 until 1983, Sanguineti was a member of the Chamber of Deputies of the Italian Parliament. He was elected as an independent on the list of the PCI.
He was an atheist.
Sanguineti died on 18 May 2010 at Villa Scassi Hospital in Genoa following emergency surgery for an abdominal aneurysm. He was 79.

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Elise Cowen
Elise Nada Cowen (1933 – February 1, 1962, Washington Heights, Manhattan) was an American poet. She was part of the Beat generation, and was close to Allen Ginsberg, one of the movement's leading figures.
Born to a middle class Jewish family in Washington Heights, New York, Cowen wrote poetry from a young age, influenced by the works of Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Dylan Thomas.
While attending Barnard College in the early 1950s, she became friends with Joyce Johnson (at the time, Joyce Glassman). It was during this period that she was first introduced to Ginsberg by philosophy professor Donald Cook. The two discovered a mutual acquaintance in Carl Solomon, whom they had both met while spending time separately in a mental hospital. A romantic involvement followed in the spring and summer of 1953. However, it was during this time that Ginsberg began to embrace his homosexuality, and the relationship gradually dissolved. Despite this, Cowen remained emotionally attached to Ginsberg for the rest of her life.^{[citation needed]}

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Emily Dickinson
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life. After she studied at the Amherst Academy for seven years in her youth, she spent a short time at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to her family's house in Amherst. Thought of as an eccentric by the locals, she became known for her penchant for white clothing and her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, even leave her room. Most of her friendships were therefore carried out by correspondence.
Although Dickinson was a prolific private poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems were published during her lifetime. The work that was published during her lifetime was usually altered significantly by the publishers to fit the conventional poetic rules of the time. Dickinson's poems are unique for the era in which she wrote; they contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often use slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation. Many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two recurring topics in letters to her friends.

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Eugenio Montale
Eugenio Montale (October 12, 1896 – September 12, 1981) was an Italian poet, prose writer, editor and translator, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975.
Montale was born in Genoa. His family were chemical products traders (his father furnished Italo Svevo's firm). The poet's niece, Bianca Montale, in her Cronaca famigliare ("Family Chronicle") of 1986 portrays the family's common characteristics as "nervous fragility, shyness, concision in speaking, a tendency to see the worst in every event, a certain sense of humour".
Montale was the youngest of six sons. He recalled:
We had a large family. My brothers went to the scagno ["office" in Genoese]. My only sister had a university education, but I had not such a possibility. In many families the unspoken arrangement existed that the youngest was released from the task to keep up the family's name.
In 1915 Montale worked as an accountant, but was left free to follow his literary passion, frequenting the city's libraries and attending his sister Marianna's private philosophy lessons. He also studied opera singing with the baritone Ernesto Sivori.

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Eugène Guillevic
Eugène Guillevic (Carnac, Morbihan, France, August 5, 1907 Carnac – March 19, 1997 Paris) (French pronunciation: [øʒɛn ɡijəvik]) was one of the better known French poets of the second half of the 20th century. Professionally, he went under just the single name "Guillevic".
He was born in the rocky landscape and marine environment of Brittany. His father, a sailor, was a policeman and took him to Jeumont (Nord) in 1909, Saint-Jean-Brévelay (Morbihan) in 1912, and Ferrette (Haut-Rhin) in 1919.
After a BA in mathematics, he was placed by the exams of 1926, in the Administration of Registration (Alsace, Ardennes). Appointed in 1935 to Paris as senior editor at the Directorate General at the Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs, he was assigned in 1942 to control the economy. He was from 1945 to 1947 in the Cabinets of Ministers Francis Billoux (National Economy) and Charles Tillon (Reconstruction). In 1947 after the ouster of Communist ministers, he returned to the Inspector General of Economics, where his work included studies of the economy and planning, until his retirement in 1967.

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Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an American expatriate poet, critic and a major figure of the early modernist movement. His contribution to poetry began with his promotion of Imagism, a movement that derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry, stressing clarity, precision and economy of language. His best-known works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and his unfinished 120-section epic, The Cantos (1917–1969).
Working in London in the early 20th century as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, Pound helped to discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost, and Ernest Hemingway. He was responsible for the publication in 1915 of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and for the serialization from 1918 of Joyce's Ulysses. Hemingway wrote of him in 1925: "He defends [his friends] when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail. ... He writes articles about them. He introduces them to wealthy women. He gets publishers to take their books. He sits up all night with them when they claim to be dying ... he advances them hospital expenses and dissuades them from suicide."

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Fatos Arapi
Fatos Arapi is an Albanian poet, short story writer, translator and journalist, laureate of the Struga Poetry Evenings Golden Wreath Award for 2008.
Born in 1930 in the village of Zvërnec near Vlorë, he studied economics in Sofia, Bulgaria from 1949 to 1954, then started to work as a journalist in Tirana. He soon made a name for himself as a poet, and went on to work as a researcher for the History and Philology Department of Tirana University. He now lives in Tirana.
Never fearing innovation, despite the cultural isolation of his country, Arapi has been a pioneer of free verse and experimental poetry in 1960s Albanian literature. Born on the seaside, the maritime universe has always inspired his verses, as has Albania's troubled history. He has also written meditative poetry, love poems and elegies, with the eternal questions on life and death as a recurrent theme.
He translated into Albanian the works of poets such as Sapho, Pablo Neruda and Nikola Vaptsarov. He was the editor-in-chief of two anthologies: Songs of the Peoples and Antology of Turkish Verse.

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Fazıl Hüsnü Dağlarca
Fazıl Hüsnü Dağlarca (26 August 1914, Istanbul – 15 October 2008, Istanbul) was one the most prolific Turkish poets of the republican Turkey with more than 60 collections of his poems published as of 2007, laureate of the Struga Poetry Evenings Golden Wreath Award .
His purist use of the Turkish language brought a new dimension to contemporary Turkish literature. His poems treat themes such as the prehistory of mankind and the cosmos, but also antimilitarist themes and the Turkish War of Independence.
A selection of his poems have been translated into English by Talat Sait Halman (Selected Poems, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1969).
Fazıl Hüsnü Dağlarca died on October 16, 2008 in İstanbul. He was laid to rest at the Karacaahmet Cemetery on October 20, 2008 following a funeral ceremony held in the Süreyya Opera House that was attended by politicians and high-ranked officers.

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Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka (German pronunciation: [fʁants ˈkafka]; 3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was an influential German-language author of novels and short stories. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century. The term "Kafkaesque" has become part of the English language.
Kafka was born to middle class, German-speaking, Jewish parents, in Prague, Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The house in which he was born, on the Old Town Square next to Prague's Church of St Nicholas, now contains a permanent exhibition devoted to the author.
Most of Kafka's writing, including the large body of his unfinished work, was published posthumously.
Franz Kafka was born into a middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish family in Prague (now the Czech Republic). His father, Hermann Kafka (1852–1931), was described as a "huge, selfish, overbearing businessman" and by Kafka himself as "a true Kafka in strength, health, appetite, loudness of voice, eloquence, self-satisfaction, worldly dominance, endurance, presence of mind, [and] knowledge of human nature". Hermann was the fourth child of Jacob Kafka, a shochet or ritual slaughterer, and came to Prague from Osek, a Czech-speaking Jewish village near Písek in southern Bohemia. After working as a traveling sales representative, he established himself as an independent retailer of men's and women's fancy goods and accessories, employing up to 15 people and using a jackdaw (kavka in Czech) as his business logo. Kafka's mother, Julie (1856–1934), was the daughter of Jakob Löwy, a prosperous brewer in Poděbrady, and was better educated than her husband.

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Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder (born May 8, 1930) is an American poet (often associated with the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance), as well as an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist (frequently described as the "poet laureate of Deep Ecology"). Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His work, in his various roles, reflects an immersion in both Buddhist spirituality and nature. Snyder has translated literature into English from ancient Chinese and modern Japanese. For many years, Snyder served as a faculty member at the University of California, Davis, and he also served for a time on the California Arts Council.
Gary Sherman Snyder was born in San Francisco, California to Harold and Lois Hennessy Snyder. Snyder is of German, Scots-Irish, and English ancestry. His family, impoverished by the Great Depression, moved to King County, Washington, when he was two years old. There they tended dairy cows, kept laying hens, had a small orchard, and made cedar-wood shingles, until moving to Portland, Oregon ten years later. At the age of seven, Snyder was laid up for four months by an accident. "So my folks brought me piles of books from the Seattle Public Library," he recalled in interview, "and it was then I really learned to read and from that time on was voracious — I figure that accident changed my life. At the end of four months, I had read more than most kids do by the time they're eighteen. And I didn't stop." Also during his ten childhood years in Washington, Snyder became aware of the presence of the Coast Salish people and developed an interest in the Native American peoples in general and their traditional relationship with nature.

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Gennadiy Aygi
Gennadiy Nikolaevich Aygi (Russian: Генна́дий Никола́евич Айги́ [] (

listen), Chuvash: Геннадий Николаевич Айхи; 21 August 1934 - 21 February 2006, Moscow) was a Chuvash poet and a translator. His poetry is written both in Chuvash and in Russian.
He was born in the village of Shaimurzino (Çĕnyal), Chuvashia (USSR) and started writing poetry in the Chuvash language in 1958.
Among the recognitions he has won are the Andrey Bely Prize (1987), the Pasternak Prize (2000, the first to be awarded this), the Prize of the French Academy (1972), the Petrarch Prize (1993), and the Golden Wreath of the Struga Poetry Evenings in 1994.
Sofia Gubaidulina set several of his poems to music in her cycle Jetzt immer Schnee ("Now always snow").
His son Aleksey Aygi is a composer.

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George Macbeth
George Mann MacBeth (19 January 1932 – 16 February 1992) was a Scottish poet and novelist. He was born in Shotts, Lanarkshire.
When he was three, his family moved to Sheffield. He was educated in Sheffield at King Edward VII School where he was Head Prefect in 1951 (photo), before going up to New College, Oxford, with an Open Scholarship in Classics.
He joined BBC Radio on graduating in 1955 from the University of Oxford. He worked there, as a producer of programmes on poetry, notably for the BBC Third Programme, until 1976. He was a member of The Group.
He resigned from the BBC to take up novel writing; he introduced a series of thrillers involving the spy, Cadbury. In his later post-BBC years, after divorcing his first wife, he married the novelist Lisa St Aubin de Terán, by whom he had a child, Alexander Morton George MacBeth, and after an acrimonious divorce, moved with his new wife, Penny, to Ireland to live at Moyne Park , Abbeyknockmoy, near Tuam in County Galway. A few months later, George MacBeth was diagnosed as suffering from motor neurone disease, of which he died in early 1992. In the last poetry he wrote, MacBeth provides an anatomy of a cruel disease and the destruction it caused two people deeply in love. Penny and George had two children , Diana ("Lally") Francesca Ronchetti MacBeth and George Edward Morton Mann MacBeth.

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Gregory Corso
Gregory Nunzio Corso (March 26, 1930 – January 17, 2001) was an American poet, youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers (with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs).
Corso's first volume of poetry The Vestal Lady on Brattle was published in 1955 (with the assistance of students at Harvard, where he had been auditing classes). Corso was the second of the Beats to be published (after only Kerouac's The Town and the City), despite being the youngest. His poems were first published in the Harvard Advocate. In 1958, Corso had an expanded collection of poems published as number 8 in the City Lights Pocket Poets Series: Gasoline & The Vestal Lady on Brattle. Of his many notable poems are: "Bomb" (a "concrete poem" formatted in typed paper slips of verse, arranged in the shape of a mushroom cloud), "Elegiac Feelings American" of the recently deceased Jack Kerouac, and "Marriage", a humorous meditation on the institution, perhaps his signature poem. And later in life, "The Whole Mess Almost".

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Harold Chapman
Harold Stephen Chapman (born 26 March 1927 in Deal) is a photographer noted for chronicalling the 1950s in Paris.
He has produced a large body of work over many years, but his most significant period was from the mid 1950s to the early 1960s, when he lived in a backstreet Left Bank guesthouse in Paris later nicknamed (by Verta Kali Smart) ‘the Beat Hotel’. There he chronicled in detail the life and times of his fellow residents – among them Allen Ginsberg and his lover Peter Orlovsky, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Sinclair Beiles, Brion Gysin, Harold Norse, and other great names of Beat Generation poetry and art. When the Beat Hotel finally closed its doors in 1963, Chapman was the last guest to leave. The extraordinary collection of photographs he had taken there were to become the mainstay of his reputation, a unique record both artistic and historic.
Yet increasingly his other work attracts worldwide attention, and could yet prove a greater legacy. Portraits, landscapes, bizarre objets trouvés and, especially, distinctive enigmatic street scenes (often involving incongruous background advertising), combine his two characteristic emotions – pervasive moody anxiety and quirky wit.

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Harry Fainlight
Harry Fainlight (1935–1982) was a British/American poet associated with the Beats movement.
He was the younger brother of Ruth Fainlight (b 1931), also a poet, who edited a posthumous volume of his work, Selected Poems, published in 1986.
Educated at English grammar schools and Cambridge University, where he was contemporary with Ted Hughes, Fainlight was a precocious youth who admired the Beat poets and published in English magazines like Encounter from his early twenties. Dual citizenship gave him the opportunity to travel freely to the US and view heroes such as Allen Ginsberg at first-hand. He stayed in New York for three years from 1962. During his sojourn there, Ginsberg called him, “the most gifted English poet of his generation”, and Fainlight contributed to Fuck You, a radical arts magazine published by Ed Sanders (see also The Fugs).
Like Ginsberg, Fainlight was Jewish and a keen experimenter with drugs. While in America his work included a poem, Mescaline Notes and a disturbing epic about a bad LSD trip, The Spider.

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Hart Crane
Harold Hart Crane (July 21, 1899 – April 27, 1932) was an American poet. Finding both inspiration and provocation in the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Crane wrote modernist poetry that was difficult, highly stylized, and ambitious in its scope. In his most ambitious work, The Bridge, Crane sought to write an epic poem, in the vein of The Waste Land, that expressed a more optimistic view of modern, urban culture than the one that he found in Eliot's work. In the years following his suicide at the age of 32, Crane has come to be seen as one of the most influential poets of his generation.
Hart Crane was born in Garrettsville, Ohio. His father, Clarence, was a successful Ohio businessman who invented the Life Savers candy and held the patent, but sold it for $2,900 before the brand became popular. He made other candy and accumulated a fortune from the candy business with chocolate bars. Crane's mother and father were constantly fighting, and early in April, 1917, they divorced. Hart dropped out of high school during his junior year and left for New York City, promising his parents he would attend Columbia University later. His parents, in the middle of divorce proceedings, were upset. Crane took various copywriting jobs and jumped between friends’ apartments in Manhattan. Between 1917 and 1924 he moved back and forth between New York and Cleveland, working as an advertising copywriter and a worker in his father’s factory. From Crane's letters, it appears that New York was where he felt most at home, and much of his poetry is set there.

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Hedwig Gorski
Dr. Hedwig Gorski (born July 18, 1949, Trenton, New Jersey) is an American performance poet and an avant-garde artist who labels her aesthetic as "American futurism". She is a first-generation Polish-American academic scholar and writer.
A first-generation American citizen, born in Trenton, New Jersey, Gorski's parents and sister emigrated to the United States from Galicia, Poland (present-day Ukraine) following World War II, where two aunts and a grandmother were murdered by Ukrainian partisans.
Her father joined the Polish Underground at age 14, and later the United States Army, arriving with his family in the U.S. in 1949 on the General Sturgis which docked in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her father did electrical work in Napoleonville before moving to New Jersey. After receiving a Bachelors of Fine Arts in painting from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (NSCAD) in Canada, she moved with her first husband to Austin, Texas in 1977. She is married to her second husband, composer D'Jalma Garnier.

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Helen Vendler
Helen Hennessy Vendler (born April 30, 1933 in Boston, MA) is a leading American critic of poetry.
Vendler has written books on Emily Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, John Keats, and Seamus Heaney. She has been a professor of English at Harvard University since 1984; between 1981 and 1984 she taught alternating semesters at Harvard and Boston University. In 1990 she was appointed to an endowed chair as the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor. She is the first woman to hold this position. She has also taught at Cornell University, Swarthmore and Smith Colleges, and Boston University. She married (then later divorced) the philosopher Zeno Vendler with whom she had one son. In 1992 Vendler received a Litt. D. from Bates College.^{[citation needed]}
Vendler did not major in English as an undergraduate. She earned an A.B. in chemistry at Emmanuel College. She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship for mathematics, before earning her Ph.D. in English & American Literature from Harvard.^{[citation needed]} She has also been a judge for the Pultizer Prize and the National Book award, in poetry.

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Herbert Huncke
Herbert Edwin Huncke (January 9, 1915 – August 8, 1996) was a writer and poet, and active participant in a number of emerging cultural, social and aesthetic movements of the 20th century in America. He was a member of the Beat Generation and is reputed to have coined the term.
Born in Greenfield, Massachusetts and reared in Chicago, Herbert Huncke was a street hustler, high school dropout and drug user. Huncke's life was centered around living as a hobo, jumping trains across the vast expanse of the United States, bonding through a shared destitution and camaraderie with other vagrants. Although Huncke later came to regret his loss of family ties, in his autobiography, Guilty of Everything, he states that his lengthy jail sentences were a partial result of his lack of family support. Huncke left Chicago as a teenager after his parents divorced.
Huncke hitchhiked to New York City in 1939. He was dropped off at 103rd and Broadway, and he asked the driver how to find 42nd Street. "You walk straight down Broadway," the man said, "and you will find 42nd Street." Huncke, always a stylish dresser, bought a boutonnière for his jacket and headed for 42nd Street. For the next 10 years, Huncke was a 42nd Street regular and became known as the "Mayor of 42nd Street."

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Herman Melville
Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick. His first three books gained much contemporary attention (the first, Typee, becoming a bestseller), and after a fast-blooming literary success in the late 1840s, his popularity declined precipitously in the mid-1850s and never recovered during his lifetime. When he died in 1891, he was almost completely forgotten. It was not until the "Melville Revival" in the early 20th century that his work won recognition, especially Moby-Dick, which was hailed as one of the literary masterpieces of both American and world literature. He was the first writer to have his works collected and published by the Library of America.
Herman Melville was born in New York City on August 1, 1819, the third of eight children of Allan and Maria Gansevoort Melvill. After her husband Allan died (& between 1832 & 1834), Maria added an "e" to the family surname — seemingly at the behest of Melville's brother Gansevoort. Part of a well-established and colorful Boston family, Melville's father spent a good deal of time abroad as a commission merchant and an importer of French dry goods. The author's paternal grandfather, Major Thomas Melvill, an honored participant of the Boston Tea Party who refused to change the style of his clothing or manners to fit the times, was depicted in Oliver Wendell Holmes's poem "The Last Leaf". Herman visited him in Boston, and his father turned to him in his frequent times of financial need.

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Jack Kerouac
Jean-Louis "Jack" Kerouac (

/ˈkɛruːæk/ or /ˈkɛrɵæk/; March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969) was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic spirituality, jazz, promiscuity, Buddhism, drugs, poverty, and travel. His writings have inspired other writers, including Ken Kesey, Bob Dylan, Richard Brautigan, Curtis Meanor, Morrissey, Thomas Pynchon,Lester Bangs, Tom Robbins, Will Clarke, Ben Gibbard, Haruki Murakami, Jacquelyn Landgraf.^{[citation needed]} Kerouac became an underground celebrity and, with other beats, a progenitor of the hippie movement, although he remained antagonistic toward some of its politically radical elements. In 1969, at age 47, Kerouac died from internal bleeding due to long-standing abuse of alcohol. Since his death Kerouac's literary prestige has grown and several previously unseen works have been published. All of his books are in print today, among them: On the Road, Doctor Sax, The Dharma Bums, Mexico City Blues, The Subterraneans, Desolation Angels, Visions of Cody and Big Sur.

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Jane Kramer
Jane Kramer (born August 7, 1938) is an American journalist who is the European correspondent for The New Yorker; she has written a regular "Letter from Europe" for twenty years. Kramer has also written nine books, the latest of which, Lone Patriot (2003), is about a militia in the American West. Her other books include The Last Cowboy, Europeans and The Politics of Memory.
In Last Cowboy and Lone Patriot she explored downward mobility in America.
Kramer was born in Providence, Rhode Island. She has a B.A. in English from Vassar College and an M.A. in English from Columbia University.
For the first paperback edition of The Last Cowboy, Kramer received a 1981 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Her other awards include an Emmy Award for documentary filmmaking, National Magazine Award, Front Page Award, and the Prix européen de l'essai Charles Veillon.
Kramer is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a founding director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. She has taught at Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence, CUNY, and the University of California, Berkeley.

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Janis Joplin
Janis Lyn Joplin (January 19, 1943 – October 4, 1970) was an American singer and songwriter from Port Arthur, Texas. As a youth Joplin was ridiculed by her fellow students due to her unconventional appearance and personal beliefs. She later sang about her experience at school through her song "Ego Rock". Early in her life, Joplin cultivated a rebellious and unconventional lifestyle, becoming a beatnik poet. She began her singing career as a folk and blues singer in San Francisco, playing clubs and bars with her guitar and auto-harp.
Joplin first rose to prominence in the late 1960s as the lead singer of the psychedelic-acid rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company, and later as a solo artist with her more soulful and bluesy backing groups, The Kozmic Blues Band and The Full Tilt Boogie Band. She was one of the more popular acts at the Monterey Pop Festival and later became one of the major attractions to the Woodstock festival and the Festival Express train tour.
Janis Joplin only charted five singles in her life but her hits and other popular songs from throughout her short four year career include "Down On Me", "Bye, Bye Baby", "Coo Coo", "Summertime", "Piece of My Heart", "Turtle Blues", "Ball 'n' Chain", "Try (Just A Little Bit Harder)", "Maybe", "To Love Somebody", "Kozmic Blues", "Work Me, Lord", "Move Over", "Cry Baby", "A Woman Left Lonely" "Get It While You Can", "My Baby", "Trust Me", "Mercedes Benz", "One Night Stand", "Raise Your Hand" and her only number one hit, "Me and Bobby McGee".

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Jeff Nuttall
Jeff Nuttall (July 8, 1933 – January 4, 2004) was an English poet, publisher, actor, painter, sculptor, jazz trumpeter, anarchist sympathiser and social commentator who was a key part of the British 1960s counter-culture. He was the brother of literary critic A. D. Nuttall.
Jeff Nuttall was born in Clitheroe, Lancashire, and grew up in Herefordshire. He studied painting in the years after the Second World War and began publishing poetry in the early 1960s. Together with Bob Cobbing, he founded the influential Writers Forum Press and writers workshop.
He also associated with many of the American beat generation writers, especially William Burroughs. Nuttall's self-published "My Own Mag" mimeographed newsletter provided Burroughs with an important outlet for his experimental literature in the early 1960s.
In 1966 he was one of the founders of the People Show, an early and long-lasting performance art group and was involved in the founding of the UK underground newspaper International Times. In 1967 two of his illustrations appeared in the counter-cultural tabloid newspaper The Last Times (Volume 1, number 1, Fall 1967) published by Charles Plymell.

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Jim Cohn
Jim Cohn is a poet, poetry activist, and spoken word artist in the United States. He was born in Highland Park, Illinois, in 1953. Early poetics and musical influences include Bob Dylan, the subject of a now lost audiotaped for a class project completed in his senior year at Shaker Heights High School, where he also co-captained the varsity football team. He received a BA from the University of Colorado at Boulder in English (1976) and a Certificate of Poetics (1980) from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University where he was a teaching assistant to Allen Ginsberg. He received his M.S. Ed. in English and Deaf Education from the University of Rochester and the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) in 1986. For over two decades, he worked in the field of disability services, taking a siddha approach as a model of Disability Services and Studies practice and scholarship. He believed that the social sciences should be redefined thematically within the United States into a form of American Karmic Studies.

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John Clellon Holmes
John Clellon Holmes (March 12, 1926 - March 30, 1988), born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, was an author, poet and professor, best known for his 1952 novel Go. Considered the first "Beat" novel, Go depicted events in his life with his friends Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg. He was often referred to as the "quiet Beat" and was one of Kerouac's closest friends. Holmes also wrote what is considered the definitive jazz novel of the Beat Generation, The Horn.
Holmes was more an observer and documenter of beat characters like Ginsberg, Cassady and Kerouac than one of them. He asked Ginsberg for "any and all information on your poetry and your visions" (shortly before Ginsberg's admission into hospital) saying that "I am interested in knowing also anything you may wish to tell... about Neal, Huncke, Lucien in relation to you..." (referring to Herbert Huncke and Lucien Carr), to which Ginsberg replied with an 11-page letter detailing, as completely as he could, the nature of his "divine vision".

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John Keats
John Keats (

/ˈkiːts/; 31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English Romantic poet. He was one of the main figures of the second generation of romantic poets along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, despite his work only having been in publication for four years before his death.
Although his poems were not generally well received by critics during his life, his reputation grew after his death, so that by the end of the 19th century he had become one of the most beloved of all English poets. He had a significant influence on a diverse range of later poets and writers. Jorge Luis Borges stated that his first encounter with Keats was the most significant literary experience of his life.
The poetry of Keats is characterized by sensual imagery, most notably in the series of odes. Today his poems and letters are some of the most popular and most analyzed in English literature.
John Keats was born on 31 October 1795 to Thomas and Frances Jennings Keats. Keats and his family seemed to have marked his birthday on 29 October, however baptism records give the birth date as the 31st. He was the eldest of four surviving children; George (1797–1841), Thomas (1799–1818) and Frances Mary "Fanny" (1803–1889). Another son was lost in infancy. John was born in central London although there is no clear evidence of the exact location. His father first worked as a hostler at the stables attached to the Swan and Hoop inn, an establishment he later managed and where the growing family lived for some years. Keats believed that he was born at the inn, a birthplace of humble origins, but there is no evidence to support this. The Keats at the Globe pub now occupies the site, a few yards from modern day Moorgate station. He was baptised at St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate and sent to a local dame school as a child.

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Jonah Raskin
Jonah Raskin (born January 3, 1942) is an American writer who left an East Coast university teaching position to participate in the 1970s radical counterculture as a free-lance journalist, then returned to the academy in California in the 1980s to write probing studies of Abbie Hoffman and Allen Ginsberg and reviews of northern California writers whom he styled as "natives, newcomers, exiles and fugitives." Beginning as a lecturer in English at Sonoma State University in 1981, he moved to chair of the Communications Studies Department from 1988 to 2007, while serving as a book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle and the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat. He retired from his teaching position in 2011.
Born in New York City to a secular Jewish family, Raskin was raised in Huntington, Long Island. His parents were Communists in the 1930s and 1940s, but as his father became a successful attorney in the 1950s, they concealed their radical politics and were careful to blend into their middle-class community. Hiding, dissembling, and disguising would become persistent themes in Raskin's writing, along with the personas of the exile and the fugitive. Raskin gave every appearance of being the all-American teenager; he was co-captain of his high school football team, and named to Newsday's All-Suffolk Football Squad in 1958. He also worked as a sports reporter for The Long Islander in his last year of high school.

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Joseph Brodsky
Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky (Russian: Ио́сиф Алекса́ндрович Бро́дский, IPA: [ˈjɵsʲɪf ˈbrotskʲɪj] (

listen); 24 May 1940 – 28 January 1996), was a Russian poet and essayist.
In 1964, 23-year-old Brodsky was arrested and charged with the crime of "social parasitism" He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972 and settled in America with the help of W. H. Auden and other supporters. He taught thereafter at universities including those at Yale, Cambridge and Michigan.
Brodsky was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature "for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity". He was appointed American Poet Laureate in 1991.
Brodsky was born into a Jewish family in Leningrad. His father, Aleksandr Brodsky, was a professional photographer in the Soviet Navy and his mother, Maria Volpert Brodsky, was a professional interpreter whose work often helped to support the family. They lived in communal apartments, in poverty, marginalized by their Jewish status. In early childhood Brodsky survived the Siege of Leningrad where he and his parents nearly died of starvation; an aunt of his did die of hunger. He later suffered from various health problems caused by the siege. Brodsky commented that many of his teachers were anti-Semitic and that he felt like a dissident from an early age. He noted "I began to despise Lenin, even when I was in the first grade, not so much because of his political philosophy or practice ... but because of his omnipresent images."

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Joyce Johnson
Joyce Johnson (born 1935) is an American author of fiction and nonfiction who won a National Book Critics Circle Award for her memoir Minor Characters about her relationship with Jack Kerouac.
Born Joyce Glassman to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, Joyce was raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a few blocks from the apartment of Joan Vollmer Adams where William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac lived from 1944-46. She was a child actress and appeared in the Broadway production of I Remember Mama, which she writes about in her 2004 memoir Missing Men.
At the age of 13, Joyce rebelled against her controlling parents and began hanging out in Washington Square. She matriculated at Barnard College at 16, failing her graduation by one class. It was at Barnard that she became friends with Elise Cowen (briefly Allen Ginsberg's lover) who introduced her to the Beat circle. Ginsberg arranged for Glassman and Kerouac to meet on a blind date while she was working on her first novel, which was sold to Random House when she was only twenty-one and appeared five years later in 1962 just as she was starting her long career as a book editor.

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Justo Jorge Padrón
Justo Jorge Padrón (born 1943 in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria) is a Spanish poet, essayist, and translator. His work has been described as confirming "[t]he strength of modern Canarian poetry"
After studying law, philosophy, and literature at the University of Barcelona, he returned in 1967 to his native city, where for seven years he practiced law. During this time he published his first poems and entered into contact with other young Spanish poets. In 1968 he was included by José Agustín Goytisolo in his anthology New Spanish Poetry. In 1974 he abandoned the law in order to devote himself entirely to poetry. Two years later he was selected by the foreign ministry and the Institute of Hispanic Culture to tour Latin America as a representative of the new generation of Spanish poetry. In 1979 he represented Spain at the fourth World Congress of Poets in South Korea and at the first Festival of European Poetry in Leuven. Padrón's work has been translated into more than thirty languages, and he was himself a translator who specialized in Scandinavian languages.

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Ken Kesey
Kenneth Elton "Ken" Kesey (

/ˈkiːziː/; September 17, 1935 – November 10, 2001) was an American author, best known for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), and as a counter-cultural figure who considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s. "I was too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a hippie," Kesey said in a 1999 interview with Robert K. Elder.
Ken Kesey was born in La Junta, Colorado, to dairy farmers Frederick A. Kesey and Geneva Smith. In 1946, the family moved to Springfield, Oregon. Kesey was a champion wrestler in both high school and college in the 174 pound weight division, and he almost qualified to be on the Olympic team until a serious shoulder injury stopped his wrestling career. He graduated from Springfield High School in 1953. An avid reader and filmgoer, the young Kesey took John Wayne, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Zane Grey as his role models (later naming a son Zane) and toyed with magic, ventriloquism, and hypnotism.

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Kenneth Koch
Kenneth Koch (27 February 1925 – 6 July 2002) was an American poet, playwright, and professor, active from the 1950s until his death at age 77. He was a prominent poet of the New York School of poetry, a loose group of poets including Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery that eschewed contemporary introspective poetry in favor of an exuberant, cosmopolitan style that drew major inspiration from travel, painting, and music.
Koch (pronounced coke) was born Jay Kenneth Koch in Cincinnati, Ohio. He began writing poetry at an early age, discovering the work of Shelley and Keats in his teenage years. At the age of 18, he served in WWII as a U.S. Army infantryman in the Philippines.
After his service, he attended Harvard University, where he met future New York School poet John Ashbery. After graduating from Harvard in 1948, and moving to New York City, Koch studied for and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University.
In 1951 he met his first wife, Janice Elwood, at UC Berkeley; they married in 1954 and lived in France and Italy for over a year. Their daughter, Katherine, was born in Rome in 1955. In 1959 he joined the faculty in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, and he taught classes at Columbia for over forty years.

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Kenneth Patchen
Kenneth Patchen (December 13, 1911 – January 8, 1972) was an American poet and novelist.
Patchen was born in Niles, Ohio. His father Wayne made his living in the nearby steel mills of Youngstown, Ohio which Patchen would reference in his poems "The Orange Bears" and "May I Ask You A Question, Mr. Youngstown Sheet & Tube?" Patchen kept a diary from the age of twelve and read Dante, Homer, Burns, Shakespeare and Melville.
<poem>I remember you would put daisies On the windowsill at night and in The morning they'd be so covered with soot You couldn't tell what they were anymore.</poem>
His family included his mother Eva, his sisters Ruth, Magel, Eunice, and Kathleen, and his brother Hugh. In 1926, while Patchen was still a teenager, his younger sister Kathleen was struck and killed by an automobile. Her death deeply affected him and he would later pay tribute to her in his 1948 poem "In Memory of Kathleen."
Patchen first began to develop his interest in literature and poetry while he was in high school, and the New York Times published his first poem while he was still in college. He attended Alexander Meiklejohn's Experimental College (which was part of the University of Wisconsin), in Madison, Wisconsin, for one year, starting in 1929. Patchen had a football scholarship there but had to drop out when he injured his back. After leaving school, Patchen travelled across the country, taking itinerant jobs in such places as Arkansas, Louisiana and Georgia.

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Kenneth Rexroth
Kenneth Rexroth (December 22, 1905–June 6, 1982) was an American poet, translator and critical essayist. He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement. Although he did not consider himself to be a Beat poet, and disliked the association, he was one of the major influences on the Beat generation, and was once dubbed "Father of the Beats" by Time. He was among the first poets in the United States to explore traditional Japanese poetic forms such as haiku.
Rexroth had two daughters, Mary (who later changed her name to Mariana) and Katharine, by his third wife, Marthe Larsen.
Rexroth was born Kenneth Charles Marion Rexroth in South Bend, Indiana, the son of Charles Rexroth, a pharmaceuticals salesman, and Delia Reed. His childhood was troubled by his father's alcoholism and his mother's chronic illness. Rexroth was homeschooled by his mother, and by age four he was reading widely in the Classics.^{[citation needed]} His mother died in 1916 and his father in 1918, after which he went to live with his aunt in Chicago and enrolled in the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Krishna
Krishna (Sanskrit: कृष्ण) (kṛṣṇa in IAST, pronounced [ˈkr̩ʂɳə] literally "dark, black") is a central figure of Hinduism. He is known as the eighth and "complete" avatar of Lord Vishnu, come to restore Dharma to the earth in a time of great dharmic imbalance. Krishna is identified as a historical individual who participated in the events of the Mahabharata.
Krishna is often described as an infant or young boy playing a flute as in the Bhagavata Purana, or as a youthful prince giving direction and guidance as in the Bhagavad Gita. The stories of Krishna appear across a broad spectrum of Hindu philosophical and theological traditions. They portray him in various perspectives: a god-child, a prankster, a model lover, a divine hero and the Supreme Being. The principal scriptures discussing Krishna's story are the Mahabharata, the Harivamsa, the Bhagavata Purana and the Vishnu Purana.
Worship of a deity of Krishna, in the form of Vasudeva, Bala Krishna or Gopala, can be traced to as early as 4th century BC. Worship of Krishna as svayam bhagavan, or the Supreme Being, known as Krishnaism, arose in the Middle Ages in the context of the bhakti movement. From the 10th century AD, Krishna became a favorite subject in performing arts and regional traditions of devotion developed for forms of Krishna such as Jagannatha in Orissa, Vithoba in Maharashtra and Shrinathji in Rajasthan. Since the 1960s the worship of Krishna has also spread in the West, largely due to the International Society for Krishna Consciousness.

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Larry Shinn
Larry Shinn (born January 16, 1942) is president of Berea College, Kentucky. Prior to this appointment he was Vice-President of Academic Affairs, Dean of Humanities and Head of the Religious Studies Department at Bucknell University.
Larry Shinn received his undergraduate degree from Baldwin-Wallace College located in Berea Ohio. In 1972 he defended his dissertation Krsna’s Lila: An Analysis of the Relationship of the Notion of Deity and the Concept of Samsara in the Bhagavata Purana and received a Ph.D. in history of religions from Princeton University. Shinn has studied Hare Krishnas in America for more than forty years and, among his other writings, published, The Dark Lord, a study of the Hare Krishnas and the cult controversy.

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Lenny Bruce
Leonard Alfred Schneider (October 13, 1925 – August 3, 1966), better known by the stage name Lenny Bruce, was a Jewish-American comedian, social critic and satirist. His 1964 conviction in an obscenity trial was followed by a posthumous pardon, the first in New York state history. His open, free-style, dangerous and critical form of comedy which brought in politics and religion and sex in a heady mix, combined with his devil may care attitude, his epic consumption of drugs, sex and alcohol, his messy, desperate life in which he conned money in order to keep his wife from having to work as a stripper, makes him a compelling figure. He paved the way for future outspoken comedians, and he paved the way for freedom of speech. His trial for obscenity for saying the word "cocksucker", in which – after being forced into bankruptcy – he was eventually found not guilty is seen as landmark trial for freedom of speech.
Lenny Bruce was born Leonard Alfred Schneider in Mineola, New York, grew up in nearby Bellmore, and attended Wellington C. Mepham High School. His parents divorced when he was five years old, and Lenny moved in with various relatives over the next decade. His mother, Sally Marr (née Sadie Kitchenberg), was a stage performer who had an enormous influence on Bruce's career. After spending time working on a farm, Bruce joined the United States Navy at the age of 17 in 1942, and saw active duty in Europe. In May 1945 he reported to his ship's medical officer that he was experiencing homosexual urges. This led to his Dishonorable Discharge in July 1945. However, he had not admitted to or been found guilty of any breach of naval regulations and successfully applied to have his discharge changed to "Under Honorable Conditions ... by reason of unsuitability for the naval service".

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Lew Welch
Lewis Barrett "Lew" Welch, Jr. (August 16, 1926 — May 23, 1971?) was an American poet associated with the Beat generation of poets, artists, and iconoclasts.
Welch published and performed widely during the 1960s. He taught a poetry workshop as part of the University of California Extension in San Francisco from 1965 to 1970.
On May 23, 1971, he was believed to have committed suicide, after leaving a note. His body was never found
Welch was born in Phoenix, Arizona, but moved with his mother and sister to California in 1929. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1944 but never saw active service. He worked for a period before joining Stockton Junior College, where he developed an interest in the works of Gertrude Stein.
In 1948, Welch moved to Portland, Oregon to attend Reed College. There he roomed with poets Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen. Welch decided to become a writer after reading Gertrude Stein's long story "Melanctha." Welch wrote his thesis on Stein and published poems in student magazines. William Carlos Williams visited the college and met the three poets. He admired Welch's early poems and tried to get his Stein thesis published.

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Lucien Carr
Lucien Carr (March 1, 1925, New York City – January 28, 2005) was a key member of the original New York City circle of the Beat Generation in the 1940s; later he worked for many years as an editor for United Press International.
Carr was born in New York City; his parents, Russell Carr and Marian Gratz Carr, were both offspring of socially prominent St. Louis families. After his parents separated in 1930, young Lucien and his mother moved back to St. Louis; Carr spent the rest of his childhood there.
At the age of 14, Carr met David Kammerer (b. 1911), a man who would have a profound influence on the course of his life. Kammerer was a teacher of English and a physical education instructor at Washington University in St. Louis. Kammerer was a childhood friend of William S. Burroughs, another scion of St. Louis wealth who knew the Carr family. Burroughs and Kammerer had gone to primary school together, and as young men, they traveled together and explored Paris’s night life: Burroughs said Kammerer “was always very funny, the veritable life of the party, and completely without any middle-class morality.” Kammerer met Carr when he was leading a youth group of which Carr was a member, and quickly became infatuated with the teenager.

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Lynd Ward
Lynd Kendall Ward (26 June 1905 – 28 June 1985) was an American artist and storyteller, and son of Methodist minister and prominent political organizer Harry F. Ward. He illustrated some 200 juvenile and adult books. Ward was best known for his wood engraving and is considered one of the founders of the American graphic novel but he also worked in watercolor, oil, brush and ink, lithography and mezzotint.
Ward spent his childhood in Illinois, Massachusetts and New Jersey. When he was in the first grade, Ward discovered that his last name spelled "draw" backwards, and decided that he wanted to be an artist. He studied fine arts at Columbia Teachers' College in New York. There he met his future wife, May McNeer, and they were married shortly after their graduation in 1926. The first year of their marriage was spent in Europe, where Ward studied printmaking and book design at the National Academy of Graphic Arts in Leipzig, Germany. While browsing in a bookstore in Leipzig, Ward came upon a book by the Belgian engraver Frans Masereel which told a story in woodcuts. This was the spark which inspired Ward to create his first graphic novel, Gods' Man, published in October 1929, the same week the stock market crashed. It was the first novel-length story told in wood engravings to be published in the United States. He went on to publish six graphic novels in total, of which Vertigo was the last and the most ambitious.

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Mahmoud Darwish
Mahmoud Darwish (Arabic: محمود درويش‎) (13 March 1941 – 9 August 2008) was a Palestinian poet and author who won numerous awards for his literary output and was regarded as the Palestinian national poet. In his work, Palestine became a metaphor for the loss of Eden, birth and resurrection, and the anguish of dispossession and exile.
Darwish was born in the village of al-Birwa in the Western Galilee. He was the second child of Salim and Houreyyah Darwish. His family were landowners. His mother was illiterate, but his grandfather taught him to read. After Israeli forces assaulted his village of al-Birwa in June 1948 the family fled to Lebanon first in Jezzin and then in Damour. The village was then razed and destroyed by the Israeli army to prevent its inhabitants from returning to their homes inside the new Jewish state. A year later, Darwish's family returned to the Acre area, which was now part of Israel, and settled in Deir al-Asad. Darwish attended high school in Kafr Yasif, two kilometers north of Jadeidi. He eventually moved to Haifa.

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Mak Dizdar
Mehmedalija "Mak" Dizdar (17 October 1917 - 16 July 1971) was one of the greatest Bosnian and Yugoslav poets of the second half of the 20th century.
Mehmedalija Mak Dizdar was born to a Bosniak family in Stolac, Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1917. In 1936, Dizdar relocated to Sarajevo where he attended and graduated from the Gymnasium. Dizdar spent his World War II years as a supporter of the Communist Partisans. He moved frequently from place to place in order to avoid the NDH authorities' attention.
After the war, Dizdar was a prominent figure in the cultural life of Bosnia and Herzegovina, working as the editor-in-chief of the daily Oslobođenje (Liberation). He served as head of a few state-sponsored publishing houses and eventually became a professional writer and the President of the Writers' Union of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a post he held until his death.
Dizdar's two poetry collections and series of longer poems, Kameni spavač ("Stone sleeper") (1966–1971) and Modra rijeka (1971), fused seemingly disparate elements. He drew inspiration from pre-Ottoman Bosnian Christian culture, from the sayings of heterodox Islamic visionary mystics, and from the 15th century Bosnian vernacular linguistic idiom. His poetry referenced medieval Bosnian tombstones ("stećci" or "mramorovi" - marbles) and their gnomic inscriptions on the ephemerality of life. It articulated a distinctive vision of life and death, drawing on Christian and Muslim Gnostic sensibilities of life as a passage between "tomb and stars", expressing both the Gnostic horror of corporeality and a sense of the blessedness of the universe.

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Malay Roy Choudhury
Malay Roy Choudhury (born October 29, 1939) is a Bengali poet and novelist who founded the "Hungryalist Movement" in the 1960s. His literary works have been reviewed by sixty critics in HAOWA 49, a quarterly magazine which devoted its January 2001 special issue to Roy Choudhury's life and works. Commemorative issues have been published by Ahabkal and Aabar Eshechhi Phirey magazines on Malay Roychoudhury. Prof Swati Banerjee has based her MPhil thesis on his poems' anti-establishment features. Gale Research, based in Ohio, United States, published an autobiography of Roy Choudhury (in CAAS vol. 14), and both the Bangla Academy and the Northwestern University (Illinois), have archives of Roy Choudhury's "Hungry Literary Generation" publications. The Little Magazine Library and Research Centre, Kolkata has a complete section devoted to Malay Roychoudhury's works. Prof B.Dey of Assam University has been awarded Ph D for his 350 page seminal work on Malay Roy Choudhury and The Hungryalist Movement.

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Mateja Matevski
Mateja Matevski (b. 13 March 1929 in Istanbul) is a renowned Macedonian poet, literary and theatre critic, essayist, and translator.
Mateja Matevski graduated from the Faculty of Philology in Skopje. He worked as a journalist for Macedonian Radio and Television, editor of the cultural and literary programme, editor-in-chief and director of the Television as well as Director General of the Radio Television Skopje. He also held the function of President of the Commission for cultural relations abroad and was a member of the Presidency of SR Macedonia. He was an editor for the publishing house “Koco Racin”. He served as Professor of History of World Drama and a professor at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Skopje.
Matevski has been the editor of the literary journals “Mlada literatura” and “Razgledi” and one-time president of the Macedonian Writers’ Association. He has also been the president of the Council of the Struga Poetry Evenings Festival, “Racinovi sredbi” and Macedonian Literary Foundation. He is a corresponding member of the North-American Academy in the Spanish language.

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Michael Horovitz
Michael Horovitz (born 1935) is an English poet, artist and translator.
Michael Horovitz was the youngest of ten children who were brought to England from Nazi Germany by their parents, both of whom were part of a network of European-rabbinical families. Michael studied at Brasenose College, Oxford from 1954 to 1960.
In 1959 he founded the New Departures publications while still a student, publishing William S. Burroughs, Samuel Beckett, and Stevie Smith. He continued to edit it for fifty years, coordinating many Live New Departures, Jazz Poetry SuperJams and Poetry Olympics festivals. Though initially associated with the British Poetry Revival, Horovitz became widely known on his appearance at the International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall on June 11, 1965, alongside Allen Ginsberg and Alexander Trocchi. In 1969 Penguin published his Children of Albion anthology. Introducing him to New York in 1970, Allen Ginsberg characterized him as a "Popular, experienced, experimental, New Jerusalem, Jazz Generation, Sensitive Bard".

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Michael McClure
Michael McClure (born October 20, 1932 in Marysville, Kansas) is an American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. After moving to San Francisco as a young man, he found fame as one of the five poets (including Allen Ginsberg) who read at the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955 rendered in barely fictionalized terms in Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums. He soon became a key member of the Beat Generation and is immortalized as "Pat McLear" in Kerouac's Big Sur.
McClure's first book of poetry, Passage, was published in 1956 by small press publisher Jonathan Williams. His poetry is heavily infused with an awareness of nature, especially in the animal consciousness that often lies dormant in mankind. Not only an awareness of nature, but the poems are organized in an organic fashion, continuing with his appreciation of nature's purity. Stan Brakhage, friend of McClure, stated in Chicago Review that:
"McClure always, and more and more as he grows older, gives his reader access to the verbal impulses of his whole body's thought (as distinct from simply and only brain-think, as it is with most who write). He invents a form for the cellular messages of his, a form which will feel as if it were organic on the page; and he sticks with it across his life..."

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Miodrag Pavlović
Miodrag Pavlović (Serbian Cyrillic: Миодраг Павловић;

listen (help·info)) born on 28 November 1928 in Novi Sad, Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes) is a Serbian poet, writer and critic.
He graduated from the University of Belgrade with a degree in medicine in 1954. He studied foreign languages and has written his first volume of poetry, 87 Poems. It appeared in 1952, the year the Yugoslav authorities, responding to a public address by the Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža, allowed more freedom of expression in politics and the arts.
In 1960 Pavlović was appointed director of drama at the National Theatre in Belgrade. He also worked for twenty years as editor for the leading publishing house of Prosveta.
A theme occupying Pavlović and many other intellectuals in the former Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Greece and Albania, is the continuity between the ancient peoples of the Balkans and their modern-day descendants. In Pavlović's work as well as in that of the Macedonian poet Bogomil Gyuzel or the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, there are frequent references to the ancient and medieval past. Among his historical poems, most important ones are ‘Odisej na Kirkinom ostrvu’ (‘Odysseus on Circe's Island’), ‘Eleuzijske seni’ (‘Elysian Shades’), ‘Vasilije II Bugaroubica’ (‘Vasily II Bugaroctone’) and ‘Kosovo’.

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Miroslav Krleža
Miroslav Krleža (Croatian pronunciation: [mǐrɔ̝slav̞ kř̩le̞ʒa]) (July 7, 1893 - December 29, 1981) was a leading Croatian and Yugoslav writer and the dominant figure in cultural life of both Yugoslav states, the Kingdom (1918–1941) and the Republic (1945 until his death in 1981). He has often been proclaimed the greatest Croatian writer of the 20th century.
Miroslav Krleža was born in Zagreb, modern-day Croatia. He enrolled in a preparatory military school in Pécs, modern-day Hungary. At that time, Pécs and Zagreb were within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Subsequently, he attended the Ludoviceum military academy at Budapest. He defected to Serbia in 1912 as a volunteer for the Serbian army, but was dismissed as a suspected spy. Upon his return to Croatia, he was demoted in the Austro-Hungarian army and sent as a common soldier to the Eastern front in World War I. In the post-World War I period Krleža established himself both as a major Modernist writer and politically controversial figure in Yugoslavia, a newly created country which encompassed South Slavic lands of the former Habsburg Empire and the kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro.

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Mukunda Goswami
Mukunda Goswami (Sanskrit: मुकुन्द गोस्वामी, born April 10, 1942, Portland, Oregon) is a spiritual leader (guru) within the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (popularly known as ISKCON or the Hare Krishnas).
Mukunda Goswami was born as Michael Grant in Portland, Oregon. After graduating from Reed College he became a professional jazz musician and moved to New York in order to pursue his music career. In 1966 Michael met the Hare Krishna founder A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada and the same year became one of his first initiated disciples, receiving the sanskrit name Mukunda Dasa.
Mukunda was a pioneer in the early days of the Hare Krishna movement. In 1967 he founded the first Hare Krishna temple in San Francisco and organized a major music event, called the Mantra-Rock Dance. In 1968 A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada sent Mukunda to London where he, with the help of other ISKCON devotees, opened the first ISKCON temple in England. In London he met Beatle George Harrison, who agreed to produce and release on Apple Records two singles ("Hare Krishna Mantra" and "Govinda"), performed by the Hare Krishna devotees from the Radha Krishna Temple in London. Released in August 1969, "Hare Krishna Mantra" reached number 12 on the UK Singles Chart and proved to be a significant event in the development of ISKCON, with the Hare Krishna devotees appearing on Top of the Pops. An album combining the singles with other traditional devotional songs was released by Apple in May 1971; due to his musical background, Mukanda was credited (as Makunda Das Adhikary) for arrangements on all the tracks. Mukunda became a friend of Harrison, who had an interest in Gaudiya Vaishnava (Hare Krishna) philosophy. They remained close friends up until the former Beatles' death.

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Nancy Morejón
Nancy Morejón (Havana, 1944- ) is a Cuban author and poet. She has gained recognition for work whose themes are centered on women and the Afro-Cuban experience.
Born in Havana to working-class parents, Morejon excelled in school, beginning to write poems at age 13 and earning English-teaching credentials by age 15. She has written that her father's African heritage and her mother's Chinese and European ancestry gave her an early appreciation of blended dual identity and transculturation, though her prime identity is as an Afro-Caribbean woman. Her first book of poetry, Mutismos, was published when she was 18. She went on to graduate with honors at the University of Havana, having studied European, Caribbean and Cuban Literature and fluent in French, English, and Spanish. She later taught French at an elite Cuban academy and held posts in Cuba's Ministry of the Interior. She is a well-regarded translator of French and English into Spanish, particularly Caribbean literature as well as works by such authors as Alice Walker, and she has been an editor for the Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba. Intellectually prolific, she has produced a number of journalistic, critical, and dramatic works. Some of the most notable have been book-length treatments of another famous Afro-Cuban poet, Nicolas Guillen, which confirmed her as his literary heir. In 1986 she won the Cuban "Premio de la crítica" (Critic's Prize) for Piedra Pulida, and in 2001 won Cuba's National Prize for Literature, a first for a black woman.She also won the Goldenn Wreath of the Struga poetry evenings for 2006. She has toured extensively in the United States, and her work has been translated into numerous languages. She continues to work, based in her native country of Cuba.

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Neal Cassady
Neal Leon Cassady (February 8, 1926 – February 4, 1968) was a major figure of the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the psychedelic movement of the 1960s. He served as the model for the character Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road.
Cassady was born to Maude Jean Scheuer and Neal Marshall Cassady in Salt Lake City, Utah. After his mother died when he was ten, he was raised by his alcoholic father in Denver, Colorado. Cassady spent much of his youth living on the streets of skid row with his father, or spending time in reform school.
As a youth, Cassady was repeatedly involved in petty crime. He was arrested for car theft when he was 14, for shoplifting and car theft when he was 15, and for car theft and fencing when he was 16.
In 1941, the 15-year old Cassady met Justin W. Brierly, a prominent Denver educator. Brierly was well known as a mentor of promising young men, and, impressed by Cassady's intelligence, Brierly took an active role in Cassady's life over the next few years. He helped admit Cassady to East High School where he taught, encouraged and supervised his reading, and found employment for him. Cassady continued his criminal activities, however, and was repeatedly arrested from 1942 to 1944; on at least one of these occasions, he was released by law enforcement into Brierly's safekeeping. In June 1944, Cassady was arrested for receipt of stolen property, and served eleven months of a one-year prison sentence. He and Brierly actively exchanged letters during this period even through Cassady's intermittent incarcerations; these represent Cassady's earliest surviving letters. Brierly, apparently a closeted homosexual, is also believed to have been responsible for Cassady's first homosexual experience.

wn.com/Neal_Cassady

Nichita Stănescu
Nichita Stănescu (Romanian pronunciation: [niˈkita stəˈnesku]; born Nichita Hristea Stănescu) (March 31, 1933, Ploieşti—December 13, 1983, Bucharest) was a Romanian poet and essayist. He is the most acclaimed contemporary Romanian language poet, loved by the public and generally held in esteem by literary critics.^{[citation needed]}
Stănescu's father was Nicolae H. Stănescu (1908-1982). His mother, Tatiana Cereaciuchin, was Russian (originally from Voronezh, she had fled Russia and married in 1931). Stănescu commented on his mother's origins on several occasions ("[I was given life] by a Romanian peasant and a Russian woman"^{[citation needed]}). Nichita Stănescu finished high school in Ploieşti, then went on to study Romanian language and literature in Bucharest, graduating in 1957. He made his literary debut in the Tribuna literary magazine.
Stănescu married Magdalena Petrescu in 1952, but the couple separated a year later. In 1962 he married Doina Ciurea. In 1982 he married Todoriţa "Dora" Tărîţa.

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Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904 – September 23, 1973) was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean poet, diplomat and politician Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. He chose his pen name after Czech poet Jan Neruda.
Neruda became known as a poet while still a teenager. He wrote in a variety of styles including surrealist poems, historical epics, overtly political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and erotically-charged love poems such as the ones in his 1924 collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. In 1971 Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called him "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language." Neruda always wrote in green ink as it was his personal colour of hope.
On July 15, 1945, at Pacaembu Stadium in São Paulo, Brazil, he read to 100,000 people in honor of Communist revolutionary leader Luís Carlos Prestes. During his lifetime, Neruda occupied many diplomatic positions and served a stint as a senator for the Chilean Communist Party. When Chilean President González Videla outlawed communism in Chile in 1948, a warrant was issued for Neruda's arrest. Friends hid him for months in a house basement in the Chilean port of Valparaíso. Later, Neruda escaped into exile through a mountain pass near Maihue Lake into Argentina. Years later, Neruda was a close collaborator to socialist President Salvador Allende. When Neruda returned to Chile after his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Allende invited him to read at the Estadio Nacional before 70,000 people.

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Patti Smith
Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith (born December 30, 1946) is an American singer-songwriter, poet and visual artist, who became a highly influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses.
Called the "Godmother of Punk", her work was a fusion of rock and poetry. Smith's most widely known song is "Because the Night", which was co-written with Bruce Springsteen and reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1978. In 2005, Patti Smith was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture, and in 2007, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. On November 17, 2010, she won the National Book Award for her memoir Just Kids. She is also a recipient of the 2011 Polar Music Prize.

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Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne (US

/seɪˈzæn/ or UK /sɨˈzæn/; French: [pɔl sezan]; 1839–1906) was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th century Impressionism and the early 20th century's new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism. The line attributed to both Matisse and Picasso that Cézanne "is the father of us all" cannot be easily dismissed.
Cézanne's often repetitive, sensitive and exploratory brushstrokes are highly characteristic and clearly recognizable. He used planes of colour and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields, at once both a direct expression of the sensations of the observing eye and an abstraction from observed nature. The paintings convey Cézanne's intense study of his subjects, a searching gaze and a dogged struggle to deal with the complexity of human visual perception.

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Peter Orlovsky
Peter Anton Orlovsky (July 8, 1933 – May 30, 2010) was an American poet and lifelong partner of Allen Ginsberg.
Orlovsky was born in the Lower East Side of New York City, the son of Katherine (née Schwarten) and Oleg Orlovsky, a Russian immigrant. He was raised in poverty and was forced to drop out of Newtown High School in his senior year so he could support his impoverished family. After many odd jobs, he began working as an orderly at Creedmoor State Mental Hospital, known today as Creedmoor Psychiatric Center.
In 1953 Orlovsky was drafted into the United States Army for the Korean War at the age of 19. Army psychiatrists ordered his transfer off the front to work as a medic in a San Francisco hospital.
He met Ginsberg while working as a model for the painter Robert La Vigne in San Francisco in December 1954. Prior to meeting Ginsberg, Orlovsky had made no deliberate attempts at becoming a poet.
With Ginsberg's encouragement, Orlovsky began writing in 1957 while the pair were living in Paris. Accompanied by other beat writers, Orlovsky traveled extensively for several years throughout the Middle East, Northern Africa, India, and Europe. Orlovsky was Ginsberg's lover in an open relationship until Ginsberg's death in 1997.

wn.com/Peter_Orlovsky

Philip Glass
Philip Glass (born January 31, 1937) is an American composer. One of the highest profile composers writing "classical" music today, he is often said to be one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century. His music is also often controversially described as minimalist, along with the work of the other "major minimalists" La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Steve Reich.
He has lately distanced himself from the "minimalist" label, describing himself instead as a composer of "music with repetitive structures." Though his early mature music shares much with what is normally called "minimalist", he has since evolved stylistically. Currently, he describes himself as a "Classicist", pointing out that he is trained in harmony and counterpoint and studied such composers as Franz Schubert, Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with Nadia Boulanger.
Glass is a prolific composer: he has written works for the musical group which he founded, the Philip Glass Ensemble (with which he still performs on keyboards), as well as operas, musical theatre works, ten symphonies, eleven concertos, solo works, chamber music including string quartets and instrumental sonatas, and film scores. Three of his film scores have been nominated for Academy Awards.

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Philip Lamantia
Philip Lamantia (October 23, 1927 - March 7, 2005) was an American poet and lecturer. Lamantia's visionary poems are ecstatic, terror-filled, and erotic which explore the subconscious world of dreams and link it to the experience of daily life.
The poet was born in San Francisco to Sicilian immigrants and raised in that city's Excelsior neighborhood. His poetry was first published in the magazine View in 1943, when he was fifteen and in the final issue of the Surrealist magazine VVV the following year. In 1944 he dropped out of Balboa High School to pursue poetry in New York City. He returned to the Bay Area in 1945 and his first book, Erotic Poems, was published a year later.
Lamantia was one of the post World War II poets now sometimes referred to as the San Francisco Renaissance, and later became involved with the San Francisco Beat Generation poets and the Surrealist Movement in the United States. He was on the bill at San Francisco's Six Gallery on October 7, 1955, when poet Allen Ginsberg read his poem Howl for the first time. At this event Lamantia chose to read the poems of John Hoffman, a friend who had recently died. Hoffman's poetry collection Journey to the End (which includes the poems that Lamantia read at the Six Gallery) was published by City Lights in 2008, bound together with Lamantia's own Tau, a poem-cycle also dating from the mid-fifties. Tau remained unpublished during Lamantia's lifetime.

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Philip Whalen
Philip Glenn Whalen (20 October 1923 – 26 June 2002) was an American poet, Zen Buddhist, and a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance and close to the Beat generation.
Born in Portland, Oregon, Whalen grew up in The Dalles from age four until he returned to Portland in 1941. He served in the US Army Air Forces during World War II. He attended Reed College on the GI Bill. There, he met Gary Snyder and Lew Welch, and graduated with a BA in 1951. He read at the famous Six Gallery reading in 1955 that marked the launch of the West Coast Beats into the public eye. He appears, in barely fictionalized form, as the character "Warren Coughlin" in Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums, which includes an account of that reading. In Big Sur he is called "Ben Fagan". Whalen's poetry was featured in Donald Allen's anthology The New American Poetry 1945-1960.
Whalen's first interest in Eastern religions centered on Vedanta. Upon release from the army in 1946, he visited the Vedanta Society in Portland, but did not pursue this very far, because of the expense of attending their countryside ashram. Tibetan Buddhism also attracted him, but he found it "unnecessarily complicated." In 1952, Gary Snyder lent him books on Zen by D. T. Suzuki. Ultimately, Zen became his chosen path.

wn.com/Philip_Whalen

Pratibha Patil
Pratibha Devisingh Patil (

pronunciation (help·info)) (born 19 December 1934) is the 12th President of the Republic of India and first woman to hold the office. She was sworn in as President of India on 25 July 2007, succeeding Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and after defeating her rival Bhairon Singh Shekhawat. She is a member of the Indian National Congress (INC), was nominated for the presidency by the ruling United Progressive Alliance and Indian Left.
Pratibha Devisingh Patil was born in Jalgaon District, Maharashtra. She received her early education from RR Vidyalaya, Jalgaon.^{[citation needed]}. She completed her Masters in Political Science and Economics at the Moolji Jaitha College, Jalgaon. She obtained her Bachelor of Law degree from Government Law College, Mumbai.
Pratibha Patil started her professional career^[when?] as a lawyer at the Jalgaon District Court.
She was elected for the Jalgaon Assembly constituency in February 1962 when aged 27. She was elected four times consecutively for Muktainagar (formerly Edlabad), Maharashtra, as a member of the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly between 1967 and 1985. Thereafter, she served as a Member of Parliament in the Rajya Sabha from 1985 to 1990. In 1991 she was elected as a Member of Parliament in the tenth Lok Sabha, representing the Amravati constituency and stayed in the role until 1996.

wn.com/Pratibha_Patil

Pupul Jayakar
Pupul Jayakar (September 11, 1915 – March 29, 1997) was an Indian cultural activist and writer, best known for her work on the revival of traditional and village arts, handlooms and handicrafts in post-independence India. She organized a series of Indian arts festivals in the 1980s in France, the U.S. and Japan that helped to popularize Indian arts in the West. She was a friend and biographer to both the Nehru-Gandhi family and spiritual teacher J Krishnamurti. Jayakar had a close relationship with three prime ministers: Jawaharlal Nehru, his daughter Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv Gandhi. She served as cultural adviser to latter two, confirming her preeminence in cultural matters. She "presided colossus-like over the country's cultural scene for nearly 40 years," founding key arts and crafts institutions and promoting talented artists, and Indian arts and crafts through festivals and exhibitions worldwide.
In 1950, Jawaharlal Nehru, invited her to study the handloom sector and workout plans for its revival, eventually she served as chair of the All-India Handloom Board and Handicrafts and Handlooms Export Corporation and played an important role in the revival of Madhubani painting. Jayakar founded the National Crafts Museum in 1956, and the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) in 1984, to restore and manage monuments and advocate for heritage property conservation. She was a founder and trustee of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), established in 1985 and in 1990 founded the National Institute of Fashion Technology in New Delhi. She was awarded the Padma Bhushan, (India's third highest civilian honour) in 1967.

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Rafael Alberti
Rafael Alberti Merello (16 December 1902 – 28 October 1999) was a Spanish poet, a member of the Generation of '27. Alberti published his first books of poetry towards the end of the 1920s: Marinero en tierra ('Sailor on Dry Land', 1925), La Amante ('The Mistress', 1926) and El alba del alhelí ('The Dawn of the Wallflower', 1927). This early work fell broadly into the Cancionero tradition, though from a markedly avant-garde perspective.
After falling in with the next members of the Generation of '27, Alberti began to show the profound influence of Luis de Góngora on his work, most obviously in Cal y canto ('Quicklime and Plainsong', 1929). It was, however, the introspective surrealism of Sobre los ángeles ('Concerning the Angels', 1929), whose tone was perhaps anticipated by some of the more sombre moments of Cal y canto, that established Alberti as a mature poet. Sobre los ángeles is widely considered to be Alberti's best work.
During the 1930s Alberti's work became overtly political, beginning with Con los zapatos puestos tengo que morir ('I Have to Die Wearing my Own Shoes', 1930). The establishment of the Second Spanish Republic in 1931 pushed Alberti towards Marxism and he joined the Communist Party of Spain. His poetry from this militant period is collected in Consignas ('Orders', 1933), Un fantasma recorre Europa ('A Ghost Stalks Europe', 1933), 13 bandas y 48 estrellas ('13 Stripes and 48 Stars', 1936) and El poeta en la calle ('Poet in the Street', 1938).

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Richard Brookhiser
Richard Brookhiser (born February 23, 1955) is an American journalist, biographer and historian. He is a senior editor at National Review. He is most widely known for a series of biographies of America's founders, including Alexander Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, and George Washington.
Brookhiser was born in Rochester, New York. His father worked for Eastman Kodak in Rochester and was a lieutenant in the Army Air Corps during World War II. He has written books that deal either with the nation's founding, or the principles of America's founders, including What Would the Founders Do?, a book describing how the founding fathers would approach topical issues that generate controversy in modern-day America.
Brookhiser began writing for National Review in 1970. "My first article, on antiwar protests in my high school, was a cover story in National Review in 1970, when I was 15." He earned an A.B. degree (1977) at Yale, where he was active in the Yale Political Union as a member and sometime Chairman of the Party of the Right. In his freshman year he took a class on Thomas Jefferson taught by Garry Wills. Although admitted to Yale Law School, Brookhiser went to work full-time for National Review in 1977; by the time he was 23, he was a senior editor, the youngest in the magazine's history. He was selected as the successor to the magazine's founder, William F. Buckley, until Buckley ultimately changed his mind. For a short time he wrote speeches for Vice President George H.W. Bush.

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Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley (May 21, 1926 – March 30, 2005) was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school's. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetry and the Humanities at State University of New York at Buffalo. In 1991, he joined colleagues Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Raymond Federman, Robert Bertholf, and Dennis Tedlock in founding the Poetics Program at Buffalo. Creeley lived in Waldoboro, Maine, Buffalo, New York, and Providence, Rhode Island where he taught at Brown University. He was a recipient of the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.
Creeley was born in Arlington, Massachusetts and grew up in Acton. He was raised by his mother with one sister, Helen. At the age of four, he lost his left eye. He attended the Holderness School in New Hampshire. He entered Harvard University in 1943, but left to serve in the American Field Service in Burma and India in 1944-1945. He returned to Harvard in 1946, but eventually took his BA from Black Mountain College in 1955, teaching some courses there as well. When Black Mountain closed in 1957, Creeley moved to San Francisco, where he met Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. He later met and befriended Jackson Pollock in the Cedar Tavern in New York City.

wn.com/Robert_Creeley

Robert Lowell
Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV (March 1, 1917 – September 12, 1977) was an American poet, considered to be one of the founders of the confessional poetry movement. He was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress where he served from 1947 until 1948. He won the Pulitzer Prize in both 1947 and 1974, the National Book Award in 1960, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977.
Lowell was born in Boston, Massachusetts to a Boston Brahmin family that included poets Amy Lowell and James Russell Lowell. His mother, Charlotte Winslow, was a descendant of William Samuel Johnson, a signer of the United States Constitution, along with Jonathan Edwards, the famed Calvinist theologian, Anne Hutchinson, the Puritan preacher and healer, Robert Livingston the Elder, Thomas Dudley, the second governor of Massachusetts, and Mayflower passengers James Chilton and his daughter Mary Chilton.
He received his high school education at St. Mark's School, a prominent prep-school in Southborough, Massachusetts, where he met and was influenced by the poet Richard Eberhart who taught at the school. Then Lowell attended Harvard College for two years before transferring to Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, to study under John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate.

wn.com/Robert_Lowell

Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein (October 27, 1923 – September 29, 1997) was a prominent American pop artist. During the 1960s, his paintings were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City and along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist and others he became a leading figure in the new art movement. His work defined the basic premise of pop art better than any other through parody. Favoring the old-fashioned comic strip as subject matter, Lichtenstein produced hard-edged, precise compositions that documented while it parodied often in a tongue-in-cheek humorous manner. His work was heavily influenced by both popular advertising and the comic book style. He described Pop Art as, "not 'American' painting but actually industrial painting".
Roy Lichtenstein was born in New York into an upper-middle-class Jewish New York City family and attended public school until the age of 12. He then enrolled at New York's Franklin School for Boys, remaining there for his secondary education. Lichtenstein first became interested in art and design as a hobby, and through school. He was an avid jazz fan, often attending concerts at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. He frequently drew portraits of the musicians playing their instruments. After graduation from Franklin, Lichtenstein enrolled in summer classes at the Art Students League of New York, where he worked under the tutelage of Reginald Marsh.

wn.com/Roy_Lichtenstein

Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney (/ˈʃeɪməs ˈhiːni/; born 13 April 1939) is an Irish poet, playwright, translator, lecturer and recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Born at Mossbawn farmhouse between Castledawson and Toomebridge, he now resides in Dublin.
As well as the Nobel Prize in Literature, Heaney has received the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (1968), the E. M. Forster Award (1975), the Golden Wreath of Poetry (2001), T. S. Eliot Prize (2006) and two Whitbread Prizes (1996 and 1999). He has been a member of Aosdána since its foundation and has been Saoi since 1997. He was both the Harvard and the Oxford Professor of Poetry and was made a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres in 1996. Heaney's personal papers are held by the National Library of Ireland.
Robert Lowell called him "the most important Irish poet since Yeats" and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have echoed the sentiment that he is "the greatest poet of our age".
<poem> From Mid-Term Break
Wearing a poppy bruise on the left temple, He lay in the four foot box as in a cot. No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

wn.com/Seamus_Heaney

Shakti Chattopadhyay
Shakti Chattopadhay (Bengali: শক্তি চট্টোপাধ্যায় Shokti Chôţţopaddhae) (November 25, 1933 - March 23, 1995) was a Bengali poet and writer, widely regarded as one of the greatest poet of 20th century Bengali literature.^{[citation needed]}
Shakti Chattopadhyay was born at Baharu village in modern-day South 24 Parganas district, Paschimbanga (West Bengal), India to Bamanath Chattopadhyay and Kamala Devi. He lost his father at the age of four and brought up by his maternal grandfather. He came to Bagbazar, Calcutta in 1948 and got admitted to Maharaja Cossimbazar Polytechnic School in class VIII. Here he was introduced to Marxism by a teacher. In 1949 he established Pragati Library and started a hand-written magazine, Pragati, which was soon changed into a printed one, changing the name to Bahnishikha. He passed Matriculation Examination in 1951 and got admitted to City College (Mirzapur branch) to study commerce as his maternal uncle, who was a businessman and also his guardian, promised him a job of an accountant. It was the same year when he got membership of the Communist Party of India (CPI). In 1953, he passed Intermediate Commerce Examination, but gave up studying commerce and got admitted to the Presidency College (now Presidency University, Kolkata) with Honours in Bengali literature but he did not appear in the examination.

wn.com/Shakti_Chattopadhyay

Shig Murao
Shigeyoshi "Shig" Murao (December 8, 1926 — October 18, 1999) is mainly remembered as the City Lights clerk who was arrested on June 3, 1957, for selling Allen Ginsberg's Howl to an undercover San Francisco police officer. In the trial that followed, Murao was charged with selling the book and Lawrence Ferlinghetti with publishing it. Murao and Ferlinghetti were exonerated and Howl was judged protected under the First Amendment, a decision that paved the way for the publication of Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence, William Burroughs, and many other writers who offended puritanical elements of society.
Murao and his twin sister Shizuko were born on December 8, 1926, in Seattle, Washington. In 1942, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Murao and his family were interned at the Minidoka War Relocation Center, Idaho. He joined the Military Intelligence Service in 1944, and worked in post-war Japan as an interpreter.
Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin, the co-founder of City Lights, hired Murao as a clerk soon after the store opened in June 1953. Murao worked without pay for the first few weeks, but eventually became the manager of the bookstore, and his genial personality set the tone for the bookstore. He continued in that position until 1976, building friendships with many of the Beat icons, including Ginsberg, who became a close friend and would stay at Murao's Grant Avenue apartment when visiting the Bay Area. Murao suffered the first in a series of strokes in the fall of 1975. When he returned to work Ferlinghetti wanted to bring in new management. Murao refused this arrangement and walked away from the store that has been his life. Murao and Ferlinghetti never reconciled.

wn.com/Shig_Murao

Simon Vinkenoog
Simon Vinkenoog (18 July 1928 – 12 July 2009) was a Dutch poet and writer. He was the editor of the anthology Atonaal (Atonal), which launched the Dutch "Fifties Movement".
In 2004 he was chosen as Dichter des Vaderlands, or "Poet Laureate", for the Netherlands. On 11 July 2009 Vinkenoog was admitted to an Amsterdam hospital after suffering a seizure. He died the following day.

wn.com/Simon_Vinkenoog

Sonny Barger
Ralph Hubert "Sonny" Barger (born October 8, 1938 in Modesto, California) is a founding member (1957) of the Oakland, California, U.S. chapter of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club.
Sonny Barger is also the author of four books: Hell's Angel: The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club, Freedom: Credos from the Road, Dead in 5 Heartbeats, and 6 Chambers, 1 Bullet. He was editor for the book Ridin' High, Livin' Free. Barger was identified but didn't speak in Hells Angels on Wheels and was one of several members of the Angels who had speaking parts playing themselves in Hell's Angels '69. He wrote a guide for motorcycle riders published in 2010.
Barger was one of the Hells Angels present at The Rolling Stones' Altamont Free Concert in 1969. He is also a prominent figure in Hunter S. Thompson's bestselling book, Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. Barger and the Hells Angels are also depicted in Tom Wolfe's best seller The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test during Ken Kesey's La Honda encampment.

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Spike Hawkins
Spike Hawkins (born 1943) is a British poet, best known for his 'Three Pig Poems', included in his one book, the Fulcrum Press collection The Lost Fire-Brigade (1968). He was part of the poetry scene in Liverpool during the 1960s and much of his output upholds the values of that group; short, modernistic, humorous pieces of free verse. He was published in Encounter, International Times and The Guardian.
He was a friend of Johnny Byrne; together, they formed the surreal act "Poisoned Bellows". He continues to be active, for example performing in the 2005 Poetry Olympics at the Royal Albert Hall
A brilliant mimic, he could imitate Harold Wilson very well.
Roberto Bolaño (1998). The Savage Detectives. Basingstoke, UK: Picador.
Liverpool poets

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Sunil Gangopadhyay
Sunil Gangopadhyay (Bengali: সুনীল গঙ্গোপাধ্যায় Shunil Gônggopaddhae), (born 7 September 1934) is an Indian poet and novelist.
He was born in Faridpur in what is now Bangladesh. He studied at the Surendranath College, Dumdum Motizhil College, City College, Kolkata - all affiliated with the University of Calcutta. Thereafter, he obtained his Master's degree in Bengali from the University of Calcutta in 1954.
He was the founder editor of Krittibas, a seminal poetry magazine started publishing from 1953, that became a platform for a new generation of poets experimenting with many new forms in poetic themes, rhythms, and words. Later, he started writing for various publications of the Ananda Bazar group, a major publishing house in Kolkata and has been continuing it for many years. He became friends with the beat poet Allen Ginsberg while he was traveling in India. Ginsberg mentioned Gangopadhyay most notedly in his poem September on Jessore Road. Gangopadhyay in return mentioned Ginsberg in some of his prose work. After serving five years as the Vice President, he was elected the President of the Sahitya Akademi on February 20, 2008

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Tadeusz Różewicz
Tadeusz Różewicz (born 9 October 1921 in Radomsko, Poland) is a Polish poet and writer.
Różewicz belongs to the first generation born and educated after Poland regained its independence in 1918. His youthful poems were published in 1938. During the Second World War, like his brother Janusz (also a poet), he was a soldier of the Polish underground Home Army.
Unlike Janusz, who was executed by Gestapo in 1944, Tadeusz survived the war and by the time of his literary debut in 1960, he was the author of twelve highly acclaimed volumes of poetry. He has since also written over fifteen plays. This eruption of dramaturgical energy was also accompanied by major volumes of poetry and prose. Różewicz is considered one of Poland's best post-war poets and most innovative playwrights.
Some of his best known plays include: The Card Index, The Interrupted Act, Birth Rate, The Hunger Artist Departs, and White Marriage. His New Poems was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2008.
Some works have been translated into German by Ilka Boll.

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Ted Hughes
Edward James "Ted" Hughes, OM (17 August 1930 – 28 October 1998) was an English poet and children's writer. Critics routinely rank him as one of the best poets of his generation. Hughes was British Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death.
Hughes was married to American poet Sylvia Plath, from 1956 until her death by suicide in 1963 at the age of 30. His part in the relationship became controversial to some feminists and (particularly) American admirers of Plath. His last poetic work, Birthday Letters (1998), explored their complex relationship. These poems make reference to Plath's suicide, but none of them addresses directly the circumstances of her death. A poem discovered in October 2010, Last letter, describes what happened during the three days leading up to Plath's suicide.
In 2008 The Times ranked Hughes fourth on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

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Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton, O.C.S.O. (January 31, 1915 – December 10, 1968) was an Anglo-American Catholic writer and mystic. A Trappist monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani, Kentucky, he was a poet, social activist, and student of comparative religion. In 1949, he was ordained to the priesthood and given the name Father Louis.
Merton wrote more than 70 books, mostly on spirituality, social justice and a quiet pacifism, as well as scores of essays and reviews, including his best-selling autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), which sent scores of World War II veterans, students, and even teen-agers flocking to monasteries across the US, and was also featured in National Review's list of the 100 best non-fiction books of the century. Merton was a keen proponent of interfaith understanding. He pioneered dialogue with prominent Asian spiritual figures, including the Dalai Lama, the Japanese writer D.T. Suzuki, and the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh. Merton has also been the subject of several biographies.

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Thomas Shapcott
Thomas William Shapcott AO (born 21 March 1935) is an Australian poet, novelist, playwright, editor, librettist, short story writer and teacher.
Thomas William Shapcott was born in Ipswich, Queensland, and attended the Ipswich Grammar School with his twin brother, who was born on the previous day (20 March 1935). (The writer is left-handed, but his twin is right-handed.) He left school at 15 to work in his father's accountancy business, but completed an accountancy degree in 1961. In 1967 he graduated in arts from the University of Queensland.
His first artistic impulse was to be a composer. By age 19, he had written a number of works, but he turned away from music when he discovered a string quartet he had written unconsciously plagiarised a chamber work by Ernest Bloch. He then worked as a tax accountant, a profession that he pursued for 27 years.
He was director of the Australia Council's Literature Board for seven years, and Executive Director of the National Book Council (1992–97). He was Professor of Creative Writing at Adelaide University.

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Timothy Leary
Timothy Francis Leary (October 22, 1920 – May 31, 1996) was an American psychologist and writer, known for his advocacy of psychedelic drugs. During a time when drugs such as LSD and psilocybin were legal, Leary conducted experiments at Harvard University under the Harvard Psilocybin Project, resulting in the Concord Prison Experiment and the Marsh Chapel Experiment. Both studies produced useful data, but Leary and his associate Richard Alpert were fired from the university.
Leary believed LSD showed therapeutic potential for use in psychiatry. He popularized catchphrases that promoted his philosophy, such as "turn on, tune in, drop out", "set and setting", and "think for yourself and question authority". He also wrote and spoke frequently about transhumanist concepts involving space migration, intelligence increase and life extension (SMI²LE), and he developed the eight-circuit model of consciousness in his book Exo-Psychology (1977).
During the 1960s and 1970s, Leary was arrested regularly and was held captive in 29 different prisons throughout the world. President Richard Nixon once described Leary as "the most dangerous man in America".

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Tom Cornell
Tom Cornell is an associate editor of the Catholic Worker. He is a deacon in the Roman Catholic Church. He is retired and living at the Peter Maurin Farm in Marlboro, New York.
He is a co-founder of the Catholic Peace Fellowship and Pax Christi, USA, a former member of the executive staff of Fellowship of Reconciliation and executive committee of Pax Christi USA and the War Resisters League and the Workers Defense League. He led the first protest against the Vietnam War, two people from the Catholic Worker, himself and Chris Kearns, July 16, 1963. In ten days their protest grew to 250 and the first nationally televised Vietnam War protest. He also called the first corporate act of resistance to the Vietnam draft, when he and five others, including David McReynolds, burned their draft cards, Nov. 6, 1965, in Union Square, New York City.
He continues in his opposition to the Iraq War, having visited that country before the Invasion in Dec.-Jan. 2003 and again after in 2004. His reports were published in The Catholic Worker. He has urged that military chaplains be trained in the law regarding conscientious objection and give positive support to claimants.

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Tomas Tranströmer
Tomas Gösta Tranströmer (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈtʊːmas ˈjœsˈta ˈtrɑːnˈstrœmər]; born 15 April 1931) is a Swedish poet, psychologist and translator. His poems capture the long Swedish winters, the rhythm of the seasons and the palpable, atmospheric beauty of nature. Tranströmer's work is also characterized by a sense of mystery and wonder underlying the routine of everyday life, a quality which often gives his poems a religious dimension. Indeed, he has been described as a Christian poet.
Tranströmer is acclaimed as one of the most important Scandinavian writers since the Second World War. Critics have praised his poetry for its accessibility, even in translation. His poetry has been translated into over 60 languages. He is the recipient of the 1990 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Tranströmer was born in Stockholm in 1931 and raised by his mother, a schoolteacher, following her divorce from his father. He received his secondary education at the Södra Latin School in Stockholm, where he began writing poetry. In addition to selected journal publications, his first collection of poems, 17 Poems was published in 1954. He continued his education at Stockholm University, graduating as a psychologist in 1956 with additional studies in history, religion, and literature. Between 1960 and 1966, Tranströmer split his time between working as a psychologist at the Roxtuna center for juvenile offenders and writing poetry.

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Tomaž Šalamun
Tomaž Šalamun is a Slovenian poet. He was born in 1941 in Zagreb, Croatia, and raised in Koper, Slovenia. He has published 39 collections of poetry in his native Slovenian language. Šalamun spent two years at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop in the 1970s and has lived for periods of time in the United States since then. For a time, he served as Cultural Attaché to the Consulate General of Slovenia in New York. He has had several collections of poetry published in English, including The Selected Poems of Tomaž Šalamun (Ecco Press, 1998); The Shepherd, the Hunter (Pedernal, 1992); The Four Questions of Melancholy (White Pine, 1997); Feast (Harcourt, 2000), "Poker" (Ugly Duckling Presse), "Row!" (Arc Publications), "The Book for My Brother" (Harcourt), "Woods and Chalices" (Harcourt), and "There's the Hand and There's the Arid Chair" (Counterpath, 2009). His poems have been translated into more than twenty languages. In 2004, he was the recipient of Romania's Ovid Festival Prize. He lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and is married to the painter Metka Krašovec.

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Trevor Carolan
Trevor Carolan (born 1951) is a Canadian writer. He has published 16 books of non-fiction, poetry, fiction, translations and anthologies.
Born in Bradford, Yorkshire, Carolan's family emigrated in 1957 and he grew up in New Westminster near Vancouver, British Columbia. His stone-mason father also ran a folk music-era coffeehouse and he grew up interested in music and art. He has noted his luck as a high-student student there in having veteran Canadian writer Sam Roddan as a teacher. Roddan inspired him to write and had Carolan’s early poetry featured on CBC Radio. At age 17 he also began writing for The Columbian newspaper and contributed articles on San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury music scene where his first introductions were to Bill Graham of the Fillmore West and singer Janis Joplin. He subsequently traveled extensively in Europe and Asia. During the winter of 1970, Carolan spent time living at the studio home of visual artist Marcos Irrizarry and Abel Bello in Pozuelo d’Alarcon near Madrid, and he credits the experience for showing him the possibilities of a life in the arts.

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Vasco Graça Moura
Vasco Navarro da Graça Moura, OSE (born 3 January 1942 in Foz do Douro, Porto) is a Portuguese lawyer, writer, translator and politician, son of Francisco José da Graça Moura and wife Maria Teresa Amado da Cunha Seixas Navarro de Castro, of Northern Portugal bourgeoisie.
He was a Member of the European Parliament for the Social Democratic Party–People's Party coalition; part of the European People's Party–European Democrats group.
He married three times, firstly in 1964 to Maria Fernanda de Carvalho de Sá Dantas, secondly in 1985 to Clara Crabbé da Rocha (daughter of Miguel Torga) and thirdly in 1987 to Maria do Rosário Bandeira de Lima de Sousa Machado (b. c. 1951), former and first wife of António Carlos Guerra Raposo de Magalhães, who died in 2004).

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Václav Havel
Václav Havel (Czech pronunciation: [ˈvaːt͡slaf ˈɦavɛl] (

listen); 5 October 1936 – 18 December 2011) was a Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician.
Havel was the ninth and last president of Czechoslovakia (1989–1992) and the first president of the Czech Republic (1993–2003). He wrote more than 20 plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally.
Havel was voted 4th in Prospect magazine's 2005 global poll of the world's top 100 intellectuals. At the time of his death he was Chairman of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation. He was the founder of the VIZE 97 Foundation and the principal organizer of the Forum 2000 annual global conference.
Havel was one of the signatories of the Charter 77 manifesto, a founding signatory of the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism, and a council member of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Havel received many recognitions, including the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Gandhi Peace Prize, the Philadelphia Liberty Medal, the Order of Canada, the freedom medal of the Four Freedoms Award, and the Ambassador of Conscience Award.

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Wally Hedrick
Wally Bill Hedrick (1928 in Pasadena, California – December 17, 2003 in Bodega Bay, California) was a seminal American artist in the 1950s California counterculture, gallerist, and educator who came to prominence in the early 1960s. Hedrick’s contributions to art include pioneering artworks in psychedelic light art, mechanical kinetic sculpture, junk/assemblage sculpture, Pop Art, and (California) Funk Art. Later in his life, he was a recognized forerunner in Happenings, Conceptual Art, Bad Painting, Neo-Expressionism, and image appropriation. Hedrick was also a key figure in the first important public manifestation of the Beat Generation when he helped to organize the Six Gallery Reading, and created the first artistic denunciation of American foreign policy in Vietnam. Wally Hedrick was known as an “idea artist” long before the label “conceptual art” entered the art world, and experimented with innovative use of language in art, at times resorting to puns.
Wally Hedrick came out of the military and car culture, first glimpsing the liberating promise of San Francisco bohemia in the late 1940s, then moving to the city permanently after seeing combat in the Korean War (1950–1953). Hedrick visited California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) in 1946. During this period, he joined Progressive Art Workers with David Simpson, John Stanley and others. The Progressive Art Workers was a social club which also functioned as a co-operative through which the group the members were able to exhibit their works. At this time, too, Vesuvio's bar in San Francisco's North Beach district hired Hedrick as an action painter to work (i.e. 'make paintings') while a jazz combo performed:

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Walt Whitman
Walter "Walt" Whitman (May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse. His work was very controversial in its time, particularly his poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described as obscene for its overt sexuality.
Born on Long Island, Whitman worked as a journalist, a teacher, a government clerk, and – in addition to publishing his poetry – was a volunteer nurse during the American Civil War. Early in his career, he also produced a temperance novel, Franklin Evans (1842). Whitman's major work, Leaves of Grass, was first published in 1855 with his own money. The work was an attempt at reaching out to the common person with an American epic. He continued expanding and revising it until his death in 1892. After a stroke towards the end of his life, he moved to Camden, New Jersey, where his health further declined. He died at age 72 and his funeral became a public spectacle.

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Wikipedia Persondata
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William Blake
William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. His prophetic poetry has been said to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language". His visual artistry has led one contemporary art critic to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced". Although he lived in London his entire life except for three years spent in Felpham he produced a diverse and symbolically rich corpus, which embraced the imagination as "the body of God", or "Human existence itself".
Considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. His paintings and poetry have been characterised as part of both the Romantic movement and "Pre-Romantic", for its large appearance in the 18th century. Reverent of the Bible but hostile to the Church of England – indeed, to all forms of organised religion – Blake was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American revolutions, as well as by such thinkers as Jakob Böhme and Emanuel Swedenborg. Despite these known influences, the singularity of Blake's work makes him difficult to classify. The 19th-century scholar William Rossetti characterised Blake as a "glorious luminary," and as "a man not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors".

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Yehuda Amichai
Yehuda Amichai (Hebrew: יהודה עמיחי‎; 3 May 1924 – 22 September 2000) was an Israeli poet. Amichai is considered by many, both in Israel and internationally, as Israel's greatest modern poet. He was also one of the first to write in colloquial Hebrew.
"Yehuda Amichai [was] for generations the most prominent poet in Israel, and one of the leading figures in world poetry since the mid-1960s." (The Times, London, Oct. 2000) He was awarded the 1957 Shlonsky Prize, the 1969 Brenner Prize, 1976 Bialik Prize, and 1982 Israel Prize. He also won international poetry prizes: 1994 – Malraux Prize: International Book Fair (France), 1995 – Macedonia`s Golden Wreath Award: International Poetry Festival, and more.
Yehuda Amichai (Ludwig Pfeuffer) was born in Würzburg, Germany, to an Orthodox Jewish family, and was raised speaking both Hebrew and German.
Amichai immigrated with his family at the age of 11 to Petah Tikva in Mandate Palestine in 1935, moving to Jerusalem in 1936. He attended Ma'aleh, a religious high school in Jerusalem. He was a member of the Palmach, the strike force of the Haganah, the defense force of the Jewish community in Mandate Palestine. As a young man he volunteered and fought in World War II as a member of the British Army, and in the Negev on the southern front in the Israeli War of Independence.

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Yiannis Ritsos
Yiannis Ritsos (Greek: Γιάννης Ρίτσος) (Monemvasia 1 May 1909 - Athens 11 November 1990) was a Greek poet and left-wing activist and an active member of the Greek Resistance during World War II.
Born to a well-to-do landowning family in the Monemvasia, Ritsos suffered great losses as a child. The early deaths of his mother and his eldest brother from tuberculosis, the commitment of his father who suffered with mental disease and the economic ruin of losing his family marked Ritsos and affected his poetry. Ritsos, himself, was confined in a sanitarium for tuberculosis from 1927 - 1931.
In 1931, Ritsos joined the Communist Party of Greece (KKE). He maintained a working-class circle of friends and published Tractor in 1934, inspired of the futurism of Vladimir Mayakovsky. In 1935, he published Pyramids; these two works sought to achieve a fragile balance between faith in the future, founded on the Communist ideal, and personal despair.
The landmark poem Epitaphios, published in 1936, broke with the shape of Greek traditional popular poetry and expressed in clear and simple language a message of the unity of all people.

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Yves Bonnefoy
Yves Bonnefoy (born 24 June 1923) is a French poet and essayist. Bonnefoy was born in Tours, Indre-et-Loire, the son of a railroad worker and a teacher.
His works have been of great importance in post-war French literature, at the same time poetic and theoretical, examining the meaning of the spoken and written word. He has also published a number of translations, most notably Shakespeare and published several works on art and art history, including Miró and Giacometti.
He studied mathematics and philosophy at the Universities of Poitiers and the Sorbonne university in Paris. After the Second World War he travelled in Europe and the United States and studied art history. From 1945 to 1947 he was associated with the Surrealists in Paris (a short-lived influence that is at its strongest in his first published work, Traité du pianiste (1946)). But it was with the highly personal Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve (1953) that Bonnefoy found his voice and that his name first came to public notice. Bonnefoy's style is remarkable for the deceptive simplicity of its vocabulary.

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Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg at the Miami Book Fair International of 1985
Born	Irwin Allen Ginsberg (1926-06-03)June 3, 1926 Newark, New Jersey, United States
Died	April 5, 1997(1997-04-05) (aged 70) New York City, United States
Occupation	Writer, poet
Literary movement	Beat literature
Notable award(s)	National Book Award 1974
Influences Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, William Blake, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Arthur Rimbaud, Hart Crane, Kenneth Patchen, Kenneth Rexroth
Influenced Bob Dylan, Amiri Baraka, Robert Lowell, Michael McClure, Hunter S. Thompson, Patti Smith, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso

Signature

Persondata
Name	Ginsberg, Allen
Alternative names	Ginsberg, Irwin Allen
Short description	poet, activist, essayist
Date of birth	June 3, 1926
Place of birth	Newark, New Jersey
Date of death	April 5, 1997
Place of death	New York City

Ginsberg, Allen Filmography

Born: 1926-06-03

Died: 1997-04-05

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