Allen GinsbergCenter, John Cage, Merce Cunningham conscious & Jasper Johns hand clasped at Academy induction ceremonial meeting, May 17, 1989.Allen GinsbergCenter, John Cage, Merce Cunningham conscious & Jasper Johns hand clasped at Academy induction ceremonial meeting, May 17, 1989.
Allen GinsbergPeter Orlovsky handsome before he left for Greece. Tangier 1961 The cement porch of our room over the bay.
Allen GinsbergBill Reck in his coldwater flat Lower East Side circa 1953, one of eminent Subterraneans (Vide Frity Nichols); he entered J.K.'s Book of Dreams as Dick Beck. outside his window off Bowery and East 2'd Street, a cemetery, he wrote "Love is a lime green tree," last line of poem looking out
Allen GinsbergPublisher-hero Barney Rossett whose Grove Press legal battles liberated U.S. literature & film — at Tower Books’ N.Y. symposium on new 90’s Censorship Politics, June 20, 1991.
Allen GinsbergHelen Parker's boys Bruce & Tommy, circa 1953, Greenwich Village, she was my friend when I was in N.Y. Psychiatric Institute a few years earlier, now we'd go to Italian restaurants downstairs on MacDougal Street with Ramblin Jack Eliot.
Allen GinsbergPatti Smith, poet, 70's cult pop singer, devotee of Rimbaud & Wm. Burroughs, retired 14 years from stage to raise children, her husband passed away. We did Buddhist Jewel Heart Center benefit in 4,000 seat Hill Auditorium, Ann Arbor U. of Michigan, she came out of retirement; next day signed new volume _Early Work 1970-1979_ in bookstore, then we suppered at Gelek Rinpoche's house, February 17, 1995.
Allen GinsbergCity Lights Bookstore visit—Philip Whalen poet Zen Sensei, anonymous eyeglassed onlooker, Amy and Michael McClure with shopowner poet-painter Laurence Ferlinghetti standing framed in door; below Nanao Sakaki Japonesia’s Bum-Academy longhair poet king, and John Montgomery kneeling beside him, Proud to be Characterized by Jack Kerouac 30 years earlier as a foolish mountaineer in _The Dharma Bums_. San Francisco, May 22, 1988.
Allen GinsbergDanny Kalb, Cafe Au Go Go Bleecker Street, I came by with his student my work-mate Peter Hale to hear late set, Greenwich Village, N.Y., April 12, 1995.
Allen GinsbergNatalie Jackson, San Francisco
Allen GinsbergMy brother Eugene Brooks, Lawyer, at his desk at Manning's Tire & Battery Service Used Car Sales, 125 Street & Amsterdam Avenue Manhattan. Jerome Brodsky Insurance Broker jack-in-box from adjoining cubicle. Fall 1953.
Allen GinsbergLynne Wildey, Bob Kaufman, City Lights Book Shop, book signing, Ferlinghetti right rear.
Allen GinsbergGary Snyder, Masa and youngest son Gen, Kitkitdizze household, May 30, 1988, Nevada City California, San Juan Ridge.
Allen GinsbergGregory Corso, Maestro Poet, ancient herald’s wand pin, messenger-god Hermes Caduceus near his pen, a quiet afternoon in “The Kettle of Fish,” an old bar in Greenwich Village under whose sign Kerouac used to drink. Gregory called me to join him, we spent a few hours talking till supper time, tired he took cab home to Horatio Street, March 13, 1995. I showed him poems by 19 year old new poet, he liked them too.
Allen GinsbergJack Kerouac the last time he visited my apartment 704 East 5th Street, N.Y.C., he looked by then like his late father, red-faced corpulent W. C. Fields shuddering with mortal horror, grimacing on D.M.T. I’d brought back from visiting Timothy Leary at Millbrook Psychedelic Community, Fall 1964.
Allen GinsbergLiving Theater genius Julian Beck 48th Street New York hospital room, his stomach-abdomen lining cancer allowed remission for the next year while he made films & video & theater & books from Zurich to Miami; “Death is the ultimate corruption,” he announced, that day I visited, Medical Arts Center, May 1984.
Allen GinsbergFrancesco Clemente, painter inspired by Wm. Blake, looking over album I'd scribed for his watercolor illumination, his loft overlooking Great Jones Street Manhattan. He liked this picture, October 1984
Allen GinsbergGregory Corso embraced by intimate friend, The Bistro, Jane & W. 4th Street, December 21, 1992.
Allen GinsbergRobert Frank & his car rented for him by Atlantic Center For Arts where we taught together three weeks with jazz drum genius Elvin Jones. We’d come to town New Smyrna Beach on errands, he showed me how to use his polaroid 195 that gives negative, but when we washed it in his plastic container of water, car-heat-cooked in Florida mid-day sun, the emulsion cracked, dissolved—this copy print from original is o.k. to catch his smile at my amateur focus, June 1984.
Allen GinsbergAllen Ginsberg, utility man S.S. John Blair first back from Galveston-Dakar Doldrums trip, I handed my camera to the radio-man on the ship's fantail, smoking what? In New York harbor, circa October 30, 1947.
Allen GinsbergNeal Cassady & I went upstairs to attic at Millbrook estate near Poughkeepsie, big house where Tim Leary’s Castalia Foundation was then experimenting with psychedelic DMT, a half hour trip. Here Neal rests with eyes closed watched over by Susan Metzner in charge of holding the vial of clear liquid, just injected. I’d driven up from N.Y. with Kesey’s Merry Pranksters in their bus, Fall 1964.
Allen GinsbergSteven Taylor
Allen GinsbergGregory Corso grounded serious straightforward looking at me Boulder, Colorado, Jane Faigao's Patio, hot tub behind him. Teaching that summer, Naropa Institute's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, earlier in the day he'd taken psychedelic "Ecstasy" powder, July 29, 1985. "Empathy" would be more accurate name.
Allen Ginsberg“…Hundreds gathered for trip in white dresses carrying cloth bags, pails, candles—going to inaccessible & most venerable religious festival of Tres Reyes…Train started 7 A.M. with a hundred in a box car, people hanging on steps of platform even—engine went off tracks like some great sad silent dead horse of iron at noon, usual occurrence.” (See _Journals Early ‘Fifties Early ‘Sixties_ , N.Y., Grove, 1977, 1992, P.37.) Narrow-gauge railroad, Merida to Valladolid, Quintana Roo, Mexico, January 1954.
Allen GinsbergGregory Corso, his attic room 9 Rue Gît-le-Coeur, wooden angel hung from wall right, window looked on courtyard and across Seine halfblock away to spires of St. Chapelle on Ile St. Louis. Gregory’s _Gasoline_ was ready at City Lights, in attic he prepared “Marriage,” “Power,” “Army,” “Police,” “Hair” and “Bomb” for _Happy Birthday of Death book_. Henri Michaux visited, liked Corso’s “mad children of soda-caps” phrasing Burroughs came from Tanger to live one flight below, shaping _Naked Lunch_ manuscript, Peter Orlovsky and I had window on street two flights downstairs, room with two-burner gas stove, we ate together often, rent $30 a month. I’d begun Kaddish litany, Peter his “Frist Poem.”
Allen GinsbergSummer 1965, 8 day backpack climbing in wilderness area of Northern Cascades, Glacier Park, Washington State, Gary Snyder back from a near-decade in Kyoto studying & practicing Zazen. My first mountain walk.
Allen GinsbergHarry Smith exhausted 3 A.M. over Chinese take-out supper. Car had backed into him up on 12th Street corner Avenue A weeks earlier, compression-fractured his knee, so he stayed with me nine months in small room behind him he’d fixed with door-latch and lock. Old postcard of Manhattan Island on toilet door panel to his right. Ethnomusicologic archivist, film-maker, alchemist, he’d designed my new _Collected Poems_ book cover, he’d been moved out of hotel room on 28’th Street, lived in Bowery shelters, was now homeless in New York! June 17, 1985.
Allen GinsbergDowntown Jacksonville's main street December 1953, Allen Ginsberg hitch-hiking to visit W.S. Burroughs' parents in Palm Beach, stopover to visit Bill's friend Marker, thence to Cuba, Yucatan & bus & train up to U.S. West Coast, meet Neal Cassady in San Francisco.
Allen GinsbergDavid Greenberg, Phi Beta Kappa Rutgers U. '93, Poet, art curator & essayist, guitar-singer Indie-Rock group "Pen Pal", co-editor Soft Skull Press, Great friend & scholar, fresh from 24th birthday head-shave: when you look at it closer it doesn't look menacing," he said first seeing this portrait. After graduation he stayed six months in little guest-room open-doored behind him. March 13, 1995.
Allen GinsbergWilliam Seward Burroughs and Alan Ansen, two elegant gentlemen at entrance to defunct San Remo Café , N.W. corner Bleeker looking north up MacDougal Street, then the heart of Greenwich Village. Before vogue of the Cedar Bar, poets painters Kerouac's "subterraneans" Gregory Corso Carl Solomon myself Frank O'Hara Larry Rivers Maxwell Bodenheim drunk even Dylan Thomas ate drank and talked till 3 AM at this central café - superb inexpensive veal parmigiana and spaghetti a la vongole in rear restaurant, wooden tables - At that season W.S.B.'d published _Junkie_ and we were assembling _Yage Letters_ and _Queer_, Burroughs improvising earliest routines for _Naked Lunch_. Alan Ansen had been Polymath secretary to W.H. Auden a decade before, helping type "_Age of Anxiety_." One mid-afternoon, Fall 1953, fixed with trembling hand.
Allen GinsbergR.D. Laing's shadow, his front porch Mapleton around Boulder, Colorado. July 7, 1987.
Allen GinsbergSandro Chia & William S. Burroughs at double vernissage Francesco Clemente's paintings, Mary Boone/Leo Castelli Galleries, Soho, March 30, 1985. Chia & Clemente had read Burroughs works when they were young poets in the '60's in Italy.
Allen GinsbergJoanne Kyger, hills leading to Himalayan flats, studying guidebook on wall in Aurora, we were on Pilgrimage to Buddhist sites, here visiting Lama Govinda, March 1962.
Allen GinsbergGeoffrey Manough, day after 18th birthday, Poet visiting New York from College Chapel Hill, North Carolina, pasta salad on 1st ave. "I feel like I could Walk / into a forest / and start a fire with every footprint / ...I have found a me long buried / beneath sludge, gripe, and scabs / beneath discrimination and self-hate. / All devices aside, / I can now say that the race is won. / I'm over the line." From _Mystic's Fists_ pamphlet. March 21, 1995.
Allen GinsbergWilliam S. Burroughs fixing typescript of _Yage Letters_ at kitchen table 206 East 7th Street New York Fall 1953.
Allen GinsbergWilliams Burroughs with a Newspaper 1953 couch 206 East 7th St. N.Y.
Allen GinsbergAnne Waldman poet orator, co-Director Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics Naropa Institute Boulder Colorado, first accredited Buddhist Contemplative College in the Western world experiencing "Make-up on Empty Space" for premiere of "uh. 'oh. 'plutonium" video, public Theater N.Y. September 14, 1984.
Allen GinsbergWilliam S. Burroughs looking serious, sad lover’s eyes, afternoon light in window, cover of just-published _Junkie_ propped in shadow above right shoulder, Japanese kite against Lower East Side hot water flat’s old wallpaper. He’d come up from South America & Mexico to stay with me editing Yage Letters and Queer manuscripts. New York Fall 1953.
Allen GinsbergAllen Ginsberg (b. 1926-) & Gregory Corso (b. 1930-), modest & immodest self-portraits, we weren't lovers but poets & jackanapes smiling and serious in turn, candid facing Kodak-Retina lens delayed-action snap, camera propped on chair other end of small white-washed room top-floor little Hotel Armor a block downhill Calle Cook from 1 Rue Magellan Burroughs' Villa Muneria, Tangier, Morocco August 1961
Allen GinsbergNeeli Cherkovski & Jesse Cabrera lover doctor at his left, Nile & Gregory Corso, friends, Jack Micheline right, Trieste Coffeeshop March 16, 1985.
Allen GinsbergLouis Ginsberg in Patterson, N.J
Allen GinsbergJack Kerouac wandering along East 7th Street after visiting Burroughs at our pad, passing statue of Congressman Samuel "Sunset" Cox, "The Letter-Carrier's Friend" in Tompkins Square toward corner of Avenue A, Lower East Side; he's making a Dostoyevsky mad-face or Russian basso be-bop Om, first walking around the neighborhood, then involved with _The Subterraneans_, pencils & notebook in wool shirt-pockets, Fall 1953, Manhattan.
Allen GinsbergRobert Duncan in his front room, San Francisco October 12, 1984
Allen GinsbergBoiler repairmen on East 12th Street near Avenue A, Manhattan December 4, 1986.
Allen GinsbergWilliam Burroughs on roof 206 E. 7 Street N.Y. 1953, with view of Tompkins Park
Allen GinsbergLafcadio Orlovsky, with sister Marie. I went to Park Lake Rest Home Ronkonkoma L.I. where he’d been sheltered & sedated the last few years, silent - till Catholic Charities arranged for Day-Care thrice weekly, he woke a bit & began crayon drawing again, phoned me & asked me to visit with Marie after 2 years absence. “Can I go home and live with Marie?” We went to restaurant on highway nearby March 21, 1995.
Allen GinsbergGregory Corso serious, straightforward looking at me on Jane Faigao's patio, hot tub behind him, he'd taken psychedelic "Ecstasy" powders earlier in the day-- "Empathy" probably be a more accurate name--we were teaching at Narapa Poetics School
Allen GinsbergGary Snyder contemplating the panorama, Glacier Park wilderness area July 1965—we went on 8 day backpack trip, my first mountain climb.
Allen GinsbergJohn Hammond ill, his apartment on Sutton Place December 4, 1986