Allen GinsbergHugh MacDiarmid on his 81'st Birthday at gate of his cottage, Biggar, Scotland summer 1973.Allen GinsbergHugh MacDiarmid on his 81'st Birthday at gate of his cottage, Biggar, Scotland summer 1973.
Allen GinsbergJack Kerouac, Villa Mouneria Garden Wall, Tangier—he’d preceded me & Peter O. on Yugoslav freighter by a month to help Type Burroughs’ Interzone “word-board” manuscript assembled for Naked Lunch. Jack left for Paris a week and a half later, On the Road published earlier that year—he’d already written twelve books, Visions, Dreams, Blues, in the “Legend of Duluoz” series, up to Desolation Angels Part I, late 1957.
Allen GinsbergJack Kerouac looking out window Apartment 16, 206 East 7th Street Lower East Side Manhattan, view from fire-escape, books on the sill, broom handle and old tenement wallpaper in afternoon sun, WM. Burroughs was staying at my place then, Fall 1953.
Allen GinsbergPoet Philip Whalen, Jerry Heiserman (later Hassan, Sufi) & student Thomas Jackrell (who'd writ interesting document-poem on Campbell's Soup) en route thru Portland Oregon returning from Vancouver Poetry Conference (with Olson Creeley Duncan Levertov) back to Bay Area, July 1963. Jackrell had a camper truck, we stopped to visit Lloyd Reynolds at Reed College, drink Buttermilk downtown.
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 GinsbergLouis Ginsberg in Patterson, N.J
Allen GinsbergWilliam Burroughs on roof 206 E. 7 Street N.Y. 1953, with view of Tompkins Park
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 GinsbergWilliam Burroughs hanging Alan Ansen, take-off on "Naked Lunch" "Blue Movie" orgasm scenario. Ansen'd typed up where Kerouac left off...
Allen GinsbergGary Snyder with Parka, Kausani...Himalayan backdrop, 1963 India
Allen GinsbergHenry Schlactner, Kerouac’s friend Al Sublette by Peter Orlovsky. Foster’s Cafeteria S.F. 1955. Me on right.
Allen GinsbergPeter Du Peru, Neal Cassady & Natalie Jackson horsing around, maybe Sunday walk, above Broadway Tunnel, Neal playing hookey from his family in Los Gatos. Du Peru, eccentric North Beach remittance man was seen by Kerouac (_Desolation Angels_) as "Richard de Chili, the Mysterious...with his low-spoken incomprehensible remarks." Natalie bewildered by amphetamine jumped off her roof to death a year late. March 1955.
Allen GinsbergGary Snyder Poet & Zen student out on mountainside forest hike near Sea of Japan, July 1963.
Allen GinsbergGregory Corso - Tangier 1961 - Peter & my room -
Allen GinsbergThe first shopping cart street prophet I'd directly noticed, fall leaves scattered on Tompkins Park sidewalk, Avenue A & St. Mark's Place, over 40 years ago. Leshko's Restaurant was cheap and popular as at present on the corner a block south, I had my snapshots developed at a drugstore near Park Center eatery across the street on S. W. Corner, & was living with W. S. Burroughs a few blocks away 206 East 7th street - working as copyboy on now-defunct "New York World Telegram," my apartment rent $29.00 a month, three small rooms. October, 1953.
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 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 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 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 GinsbergNatalie Jackson, San Francisco
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 GinsbergWilliam S. Burroughs slightly zonked, his dooryard-garden wall Villa Muneria, looking at me suspiciously, "Who are you an Agent for?" He "traced back along word-lines," cut-up technique of anti-brainwash language analysis, inquiring sources of my mental conditioning, perhaps Liberal Professor Trilling, perhaps "a trust of giant insects from another Galaxy" conspiring to make Nova Conditions on our Planet, exterminate HomoSap the Human animal so another life-form, virus invasion, move in on the Turf, such like poetries on his mind. Timothy Leary visited from Harvard, we took small amount of psilocybin, Bill shut himself inside his garden gate with a wave of his hand, allergic, paranoia season. Peter Orlovsky departed alone, ship to Athens, Bill employed for Scandinavia L.S.O. Conference leaving Gregory Corso and myself waving him goodbye
Allen GinsbergGary Snyder, Peter Orlovsky, Allen Ginsberg on wall overlooking Himalayan range vista, Kausani 1962. Joanne Kyger snapped the photo in my camera, the four of us making Buddhist tour of India stopped to visit Lama Anagarika Govinda.
Allen GinsbergPeter Orlovsky smoking Indian Hemp, November 1962 at Konarak beside fallen segment of stone sculpture —
Allen GinsbergFond Kiki William's friend, W.S. Burroughs, Chris Wanklin at another table in T-shirt, Soco Chico Tanger Maroc circa mid-fifties, negative in my archives.
Allen GinsbergWilliam Burroughs on roof of apartment house East Seventh Street where I had a flat, we were lovers those months, editing his letters into books not published till decades later (as _Queer_, 1985) Lower East Side Fall 1953.
Allen GinsbergLance Hendrickson, Tangier, 1961. We met in street, he was hiking thru Europe, stayed a week, chaste, but allowed me to photograph him thus. Saw him again in San Francisco 1963 w/ a motorcycle.
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 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 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 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 GinsbergGary Snyder contemplating the panorama, Glacier Park wilderness area July 1965—we went on 8 day backpack trip, my first mountain climb.
Allen GinsbergJoanne Kyger, then Gary Snyder's wife, on train - visit to Japan Sea, 1963 Summer.
Allen GinsbergPeter Orlovsky & Jack Kerouac squinting in late-afternoon sun, Wm. S. Burroughs with eyeglasses watching prone in olive-green army-surplus jacket, Moroccan boys interested, Port & Custom-house in background, where Peter & I docked on Yugoslave freighter from N.Y. carrying mss. _Naked Lunch_ letters, four years accumulated. Jack speed-typed Burroughs' _Interzone_ word-hoard, his own _On the Road_ just published, Peter readying to write his "Frist Poem." Jack left Tangier for Paris about a week later, April 5, 1957.
Allen GinsbergPeter’s friend Henry Schlacter from S.F. Community College, Kerouac’s buddy Al Sublette & Peter Orlovsky in Foster’s Cafeteria under Hotel Weatley on Polk & Sutter, “Polk Gulch”, we all rendez-vous’d hours & hours, living in neighborhood. Robert LaVigne made many sketches & group portrait oil tableaux small and large with mirror-reflected tables & visages of ourselves, Cassady, Natalie, etc. that season, San Francisco early 1955.
Allen GinsbergLorenzo & Larry Ferlinghetti, stopover in Fiji on way to Adelaide Arts Festival, Australia March 72
Allen GinsbergPeter Orlovsky seated handsome mysterious-haired, William Burroughs thoughtful with hat to shade Mediterranean sun, camera in hand, Alan Ansen relaxed visiting from Venice to help type _The Soft Machine_ cut-up writings, Gregory Corso sunglassed and Minox’d, Paul Bowles with elegant striped tie squinting in bright mid-morning light—all assembled, myself on right with cigarette & white trousers, at garden wall outside Bill’s single room Villa Muniria, my Kodak Retina probably in Michael Portman’s hands July 1961 Tangier Moroc.
Allen GinsbergAlexei Ginzberg and Sergei Yesenin-vulpine, Moscow 1965.
Allen GinsbergPeter Orlovsky age 23 on Ginny Lehrman's lawn Berkeley
Allen GinsbergPeter Orlovsky handsome before he left for Greece. Tangier 1961 The cement porch of our room over the bay.
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 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 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 GinsbergCharles Olson, the President, Vancouver Poetry Conference 1963, we stayed in Warren Tallman's house -- here the kitchen.
Allen GinsbergJack Kerouac, railroad brakeman’s rule-book in pocket, couch-pillows airing on fire-escape three flights up overlooking backyard clotheslines south. He’d already published _The Town & the City_ and completed a treasury of half-dozen unprinted classic volumes including _On the Road_, _Visions of Cody_,_ Doctor Sax_, early books of Blues and Dreams, & had begun _The Subterraneans’_ adventurous love affair with Alene Lee, “Mardou Fox.” Alene typed for W. S. Burroughs then in residence editing Yage Letters and Queer mss., unpublishable that decade, censorship ruled. I scribed “The Green Automobile,” Gregory Corso visited that season, 206 East 7th Street near Tompkins Park, Manhattan, probably September 1953.