Poetry Collection: Planet News

Overview
Planet News gathers Allen Ginsberg’s poems from 1961–1967 into a globe-circling chronicle of the decade’s upheavals and awakenings. Published in 1968, it reads as a series of dispatches from a poet in motion, registering public crises and private illuminations with equal urgency. The title frames the work’s double focus: news of the planet as mediated by war, radio, television, and state power, and news of the mind as it flickers through mantra, breath, vision, and intimate confession.

Scope and structure
The book tracks Ginsberg’s crossings through India and Japan, across Britain and Eastern Europe, and back through the American interior. It moves by trains and planes, street-corners and hotel rooms, always attentive to the sensory and the political in the same frame. Poems emerge as field notes, chants, and letters, their sequence creating a map of the 1960s: Prague during the Cold War, the English countryside under psychedelic skies, the Kansas plains humming with radio bulletins about Vietnam, and the ferment of the West Coast counterculture. Personal encounters and public headlines fold into one itinerary.

Themes and style
Ginsberg’s long-breath, Whitmanic line is present, but it is spliced with reportage, tape-recorded fragments, and the syntax of sutra and mantra. The diction swerves from street slang to Sanskrit gloss, from newspaper jargon to ecstatic catalog. Media saturation becomes both subject and method: static, slogans, and wire-service phrasing break into the poems, while Buddhist and Hindu vocabularies offer counter-melodies of attention and compassion. The result is a poetics of attention that treats a radio war report and a hillside of sheep as equally charged phenomena. Humor and satire temper the prophet’s jeremiad; tenderness and eros undercut the polemic with human particularity.

Signature poems
Wichita Vortex Sutra is the book’s central antiwar journey, a driving monologue across the Midwest that collages radio updates, legalese, and lyric refusal into an incantation designed to halt the Vietnam War by naming it. Kral Majales recounts Ginsberg’s election as King of May in Prague and the subsequent expulsion, fusing street theatre with a critique of bureaucratic repression. Wales Visitation, composed on LSD among streams and ferns, offers a litany of seeing where landscape becomes a vibrating field of mind. The Change: Kyoto-Tokyo Express witnesses an ego-shedding on a Japanese train, framed as a pivot from anxiety to clarity. First Party at Ken Kesey’s with Hell’s Angels captures the ecstatic and uneasy mingling of poets, pranksters, and bikers at the edge of the Acid Tests, while Television Was a Baby Crawling Toward that Deathchamber lashes mass media’s hypnotic violence. Across these pieces, the poet’s tape recorder, notebook, and mantra all serve one attention.

Tone and voice
The collection moves between grief and glee, satire and psalm. Love for companions and lovers, especially Peter Orlovsky, threads through. So do elegiac flashes for friends and for an America bent on war. Ginsberg’s voice keeps shifting register, seer, reporter, clown, pilgrim, without losing the throughline of compassion. The poems often end not in argument but in open, vibrating awareness, where the ordinary becomes luminous and the historical becomes intimate.

Legacy
Planet News marks a hinge in Ginsberg’s career, bridging the grief-struck lyricism of Howl and Kaddish and the panoramic road-incantations of The Fall of America. It consolidates a method, travel as inquiry, collage as conscience, mantra as ethical stance, that made his later public poetry possible. As a record of the 1960s, it is both document and antidote, tuned to headlines and to the quieter transmissions of breath, body, and earth. Its “news” remains the insistent claim that perception, spoken clearly, can be an act of resistance.