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ALLEN GINSBERG In 1994, The Naropa University held a week long tribute for Allen Ginsberg entitled "Beats and other Rebel Angels". One of the many events of the week was an exhibit of Allen's Photographic archives. In attendance at the celebrations were: Anne Waldman, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, David Dellinger, Michael McClure, Amiri Baraka, Philip Glass, Ken Kesey, Jack Collom, Robert Creeley, Marianne Faithful, Ed Sanders, Gary Snyder, Sharon Olds, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Anselm Hollo, Keith Abbot, Steven Taylor, Meridith Monk, David Amram and many other Beat dignitaries.
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 THE BEATS Peter Orlovsky legs crossed, Wiliam Burroughs with camera and hat for sun, myself white pants, Allen Ansen (W. H. Auden's & Burrough's part-time amanuensis), Gregory Corso sunglassed & minox'd, the late Ian Sommerville (Burrough's strobiscope-electronics sound assistant technician) on right, Paul Bowles seated squinting in bright noon light along Burrough's doorway-garden wall, 1961 Tangier. My Camera likely in Michael Portman's hands. Allen Ginsberg Information about Naropa University's library, dedicated in 1994. There is also an online memorial to Allen Ginsberg, cofounder of the JACK KEROUAC School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in 1974. A larger impact was made on him by his acquaintance with Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Lucien Carr, and Neal Cassidy; a group which was to become known as the "Beat Generation". He took his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1948, remaining in the New York City area until 1953, supporting himself mainly as a market researcher. He left New York City in December 1953 to follow Neal Cassady, who had married and moved to San Jose, California. In San Francisco, Ginsberg became part of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, a literary circle including Kenneth Rexroth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia, Robert Duncan, and Philip Whalen. In October 1955, Rexroth hosted a poetry reading in which Snyder, McClure, Whalen, Lamantia, and Ginsberg participated.in a poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco premiering his newly written poem "Howl." From the 1950's on, Ginsberg based himself in Manhattan's Lower East Side, where he rented a tenement until 1996. There he wrote the first two parts of "Kaddish to Naomi Ginsberg (1894-1956)", published in Kaddish and Other Poems (City Lights, 1961). He travelled extensively in Euope during this time and produced Planet News : 1961-1967 (City Lights, 1968), based on his experiences abroad. The following collection The Fall of America : Poems of These States, 1965-1971(City Lights, 1973) won the National Book Award. In 1974, Ginsberg helped to found the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, a Buddhist university where he continued to teach courses in poetry and Buddhist meditation until his death. In 1974 he was also inducted into the American Institute of Arts and Letters. After publishing his books for years with small alternative-press houses, Ginsberg signed a $160,000 contract with Harper & Row for six books. The first was Collected Poems, 1947-1980 (1984) followed by White Shroud (1986) which brought together the poems that Ginsberg wrote between 1980 and 1985, and Cosmopolitan Greetings (1994). Ginsberg's books of prose include Indian Journals (1970), Allen Verbatim: Lectures on Poetry, Politics, Consciousness (McGraw-Hill, 1974), Journals : Early Fifties-Early Sixties (Grove, 1977), both edited by Gordon Ball. His longtime interest in the visual arts - especially photography, a practice encouraged by his friend Robert Frank - have now been collected in two books, Photographs (1991) and Snapshot Poetics (1993). Ginsberg's photographs were also represented in a groundbreaking exhibit organized in 1995 by the Whitney Museum of Art, "Beat Culture and the New America: 1950 - 1965." Ginsberg was a visiting professor at Columbia University in 1986-87, and he taught at Brooklyn College from the fall of 1987 until his death. Allen Ginsberg died at the age of 70 on April 6, 1997 of a heart attack.
Supplication for the Rebirth of the Vidyadhara Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche Poem by Allen Ginsberg.
Concept and drawing by Nancy Davis.
Typography and printing by Arion Press using Spectrum types and Rives paper.
The Scroll was executed by Arnold Martinez using Japanese patterned paper and is 35" X 19".
Published in an edition of 76 copies, 26 are hand colored, lettered A to Z, signed by the artist and poet, boxed in Alaskan yellow cedar.
The box design is by Tom Bass.
50 copies are numbered and signed by the poet.
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Portrait
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)
Irwin Allen Ginberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1926 to Louis and Naomi Ginsberg. Originally intending to major at Columbia University in prelaw, Ginsberg changed his major to literature and studied with Mark Van Doren and Lionel Trilling.
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