Wait Till I'm Dead Uncollected Poems

Rainy night on Union Square, full moon. Want more poems? Wait till I’m dead.—Allen Ginsberg, August 8, 1990, 3:30 A.M.

The first new Ginsberg collection in over fifteen years, Wait Till I’m Dead is a landmark publication, edited by renowned Ginsberg scholar Bill Morgan and introduced by award-winning poet and Ginsberg enthusiast Rachel Zucker. Ginsberg wrote incessantly for more than fifty years, often composing poetry on demand, and many of the poems collected in this volume were scribbled in letters or sent off to obscure publications and unjustly forgotten. Wait Till I’m Dead, which spans the whole of Ginsberg’s long writing career, from the 1940s to the 1990s, is a testament to Ginsberg’s astonishing writing and singular aesthetics.

Following the chronology of his life, Wait Till I’m Dead reproduces the poems together with extensive notes. Containing 104 previously uncollected poems and accompanied by original photographs, Wait Till I’m Dead is the final major contribution to Ginsberg’s sprawling oeuvre, a must-read for Ginsberg neophytes and longtime fans alike.

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) was a poet, activist, and one of the Beat Generation's most renowned writers. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute. He won the National Book Award for Poetry and his poem Howl is one of the most widely read and translated poems of the century.

Bill Morgan is a painter and archival consultant who lives in New York City and Bennington, Vermont. He is the author of The Beat Generation in New York and The Beat Generation in San Francisco, I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg, and edited Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays of Allen Ginsberg, 1952–1995, as well as Ginsberg’s Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems, 1937–1952, and Howl on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression.