The 50s were the explosion that we know as Allen Ginsberg, and here we find a smaller poem, “Dawn,” which, though post-“Howl,” is more in keeping with the straight objectiivsm of his book pre-“Howl” writings in Empty Mirror, a directly William Carlos Williams-influenced collection: Someone with a passing knowledge of Ginsberg’s oeuvre generally considers the 50s “Howl” Allen’s best poem, and if the reader has delved further, this may have been replaced with “Kaddish” (Allen felt the latter).

Ginsberg rhymed in the 40s, and the poems of this decade are certainly promising, but “Behold! The Swinging Swan” is a missing stanza from what would become “Pull My Daisy”, written with Jack Keroauc: How many readers of this review now nod their heads in agreement? “When I first read Allen Ginsberg’s poems as a teenager, they worked on me like a gateway drug.” Poet Rachel Zucker writes the intro, and though I’m not sure why she was chosen, it is still a good opening: Bill Morgan has really tracked down over a hundred Ginsberg poems that “would have gotten away.” He has also arranged them according to decade, which is extremely helpful in examining their context. To my surprise, it was more interesting and many more pages than that. When I first heard about this book of uncollected poems by Allen Ginsberg, I imagined a slim volume of “b-sides” that would be “for the completist” as my cinephile friend describes the lesser, flawed films of his favorite directors. Wait Till I’m Dead: Uncollected Poems by Allen Ginsberg (Bill Morgan, ed.) / Grove Press / hardcover

Poems of allen ginsberg