Writing Style & Technique

-Ginsberg's style is one usually without meter but his earlier work did have meter.

-He used jazz for an inspiration for the beat of his poems.  

-Ginsberg's poems did not have line breaks so the breaks were determined on how long the reader could talk without drawing a breath. 

-He also used syntax to his advantage in a few poems and made some lines longer than others and created a pattern in that manner.  

-Ginsberg studied the structure and subject of haikus and found that they usually involved two opposite ideas.  He then took this information and did the same with his poems, making some of his work have an oxymoronic mood.

-"I hear rumors of such fame. Not for pride, only for shame." -Refrain

-"Mystic charm or magic bright, O Judgement of fire and of fright?" - On Reading William Blake's "The Sick Rose"

-"Then real estate won

out, that saved the 

               swamp 

               water

               supply" -Poem in the Form of a Snake that Bites its Tail

-"At last inquisitive Whitman a modern epic, detonative, Scientific theme..." -Plutonian Ode

-"Mary Garden dead in Aberdeen,

Jack Ruby dead in Dallas-

Sweet green incense in car cabin." -Bayonne Turnpike to Tuscarora

Examples