Morgan's "I Celebrate Myself" is a book deeply concerned with precisely what Ginsberg thought about particular events at particular times, and this moment is striking for several reasons. If anyone knows what Ginsberg was thinking, it would be Morgan. He was a friend of the poet's and worked on a bibliography of his works; he was with Ginsberg when he died; and in his foreword, he states his belief that "I'm the only person to ever have read everything Allen ever wrote." This encyclopedic confidence gives a certain buoyancy to the biography, which is stuffed with every fact imaginable about Ginsberg. Morgan is so thorough that he even feels the need, as here, to mention the details that he does not know.
For the biographer of one of America's most famous and celebrated poets, Morgan is strangely uninterested in the poetry. This work comes guarded with a nervous foreword in which Morgan declares that " trying to tell someone what a poem means is a waste of time." But he also stresses that neither is he writing a study of Ginsberg in his times, "because he had a greater impact on his times than his times had on him."
"I Celebrate Myself" is a rigorous year-by-year account of Ginsberg's life, beginning with his childhood in Paterson, N.J., and ending with his death, in April 1997, in his loft in Manhattan's East Village. Morgan retells the well-known stories of the beats -- Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Lucien Carr -- meeting at Columbia, and the famous first reading of "Howl" at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, when Ginsberg read accompanied by Kerouac, "who kept rhythm by tapping a wine jug." We follow Ginsberg on his travels in America, to Mexico in 1954 , and across the Middle East. He attends be-ins and founds poetry institutes; he teaches and gives endless readings; he appears onstage with Bob Dylan and drops in on John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
