27:1 Summer 1975

ALLEN GINSBERG

Ego Confession

“Ego Confession” was inspired by a Cecil Taylor concert in San Francisco which Allen Ginsberg attended with Anne Waldman.  As the jazz pianist played, Ginsberg wrote the first line into his journal: “I want to be known as the most brilliant man in America.”  He later said of the episode, “I was so ashamed of what I wrote down that I wouldn’t let her see it.  I hid my notebook from her with my hand.  Within a month I realized that the poem was funny.  It’s obviously a great burlesque, a take-off on myself, shameful, shocking."* The poem was solicited to by the editors of the “Talking American Poetry” issue, which appeared in Summer 1975.  It has since appeared in his Mind Breaths: Poems 1972-1977 (City Lights, 1978), Collected Poems: 1947-1980 (Harper & Row, 1985), and Selected Poems: 1947-1995 (Harper Collins, 1996).

*Quoted in Barry Miles, Ginsberg: A Biography (New York: HarperPerrenial, 1990), p. 456.

[DN, 1996]

previous | next