GINSBERG, Allen.
Planet News, 1961–1967.
FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING — POCKET POETS SERIES NO. 23. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1968.
Number twenty-three in the Pocket Poets Series. First printing, one of 5,000 copies printed letterpress and sewn at Villiers Publications, London, with the Villiers printer's notice at the rear. 148 pp. Original black and cream stiff-card wrappers in the Pocket Poets house design, the cream front label printed in black, $2.00 price intact on the rear cover. With a contemporary ownership inscription on the front pastedown — "Michael H. Page. London. xvi. i. mcmlxix" (16 January 1969) — with his note "1st Edition 1968," placing this London-printed copy in early UK circulation within months of publication. Very good; the wrappers lightly toned at the spine and edges, the sewn binding sound, internally clean and unmarked apart from the inscription.
Ginsberg's third major collection in the Pocket Poets Series, gathering the work of the seven years that followed Howl's emergence — the years of his travels through India, Japan, and Europe and of his rise as the central public poet of the American counterculture. By 1968 the series Lawrence Ferlinghetti had launched in 1955 with his own Pictures of the Gone World, and made famous in 1956 with Howl and Other Poems (No. 4), had become the principal American platform for Beat poetry; Howl (No. 4), Kaddish (No. 14), and Planet News (No. 23) form Ginsberg's three-volume contribution to it.
The collection is dedicated to Neal Cassady — Kerouac's Dean Moriarty and the driver of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters bus — who had died beside railroad tracks outside San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, in February 1968, three months before publication; the dedication reads "to Neal Cassady, again, Spirit to Spirit," the "again" reaching back to Howl. Its central work is "Wichita Vortex Sutra," the long anti-Vietnam-War poem Ginsberg composed in 1966 by dictating into a Uher tape recorder during a cross-country trip through the Midwest, attempting in Whitman's long line to "declare the End of the War." Also here are "Television was a Baby Crawling Toward that Deathchamber," "Death News" (on the death of William Carlos Williams), "The Change: Kyoto-Tokyo Express" (1963), "Kral Majales" (the 1965 Prague poem written after Czech students crowned him May King and the police deported him), and "Wales Visitation," his 1967 LSD-on-the-hillside ecology poem. Ginsberg's own rear-cover note, signed and dated May 1968, supplies a single-sentence synopsis tracking the book from New York through the Ganges, Prague, the Albert Hall, Kansas, and Wales.
SKU TO-2026-002
