Thursday, May 27, 2010

Ginsberg in Fiction

On the New York Times book blog Paper Cuts, Gregory Cowell recounts a short conversation with the novelist and essayist Joshua Cohen. Answering a question about his current and recent projects, Cohen replies:

I’ve just finished a collection of stories on two themes: pornography and poetry. The pornography is a long story (a novella? though perhaps novellas can be written only by dead Europeans), set partly in Russia, partly on the Internet. The poetry is brought by two fictionalized biographies: one of Allen Ginsberg in Havana and Prague, 1965; the other of Hart Crane at the time of his suicide, 1932.

The use by other writers of Allen Ginsberg as a character in fiction interests me insofar as I'm doing the same. Ginsberg appears prominently in a long section of my nascent novel tentatively called Pour More On. The section concerns a young 20 something couple living the bohemian life in New York City in the mid eighties and contains, as scenes and setting, the famous 48th Congress of International PEN of January 1986, and Sandinista Nicaragua during the height of the Contra War.

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