News at Eleven: Bill Morgen, Ginsberg biographer,

has provided the reader with as thorough an appreciation of context as we are ever likely to get. If he falls a bit short in this reviewer's view, it is because the Yiddishist affect and the Old Left twang are likely to evade almost every reader (or scholar) save those who went through the Jewish left-wing movements of the 1920s-40s, now the great majority of them gone. It also may be (and this from a special claim of mine) that only those whose mother has been mentally ill are likely to feel the same mixture of guilt and embarrassment, guilt and revulsion, when they read Ginsberg's poem.

from Zeek: Ginsberg's Kaddish

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