Michael Schumacher on Allen Ginsberg's Vietnam War Years

For The Paris Review, Michael Schumacher writes about a forthcoming volume of Allen Ginsberg's journals from the Vietnam War Era, The Fall of America Journals, 1965–1971 (University of Minnesota Press), which Schumacher edited. "[Ginsberg's] journal entries," writes Schumacher, "varied from lists of casualties to personal reflections about the war, from reactions to news stories he heard on the radio while he was traveling to rants against Johnson, McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and military advisers." More: 

In his best-known antiwar poem, “Wichita Vortex Sutra” (1966), he “undeclares” a war that was never formally declared; in “Taxation without Representation” (later titled “Pentagon Exorcism”) (1967), he submitted a text for a historic march on the Pentagon; in “Hum Bom” (1971), he wrote an angry chant against the bombing of North Vietnam, an action that stood in the way of peace talks. The war was constantly on his mind, and the division within America over the draft and the fighting—a schism that seemed largely generational—fortified his position that the country was headed toward revolution that might bring it down.

Continue reading at the Paris Review.