Allen biography ginsberg great late photo
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Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) is primarily known as a great American poet, the figurehead of the Beat Movement. But from the early 1950s to about 1964, Ginsberg regularly used a cheap camera to take snapshots of his now famous pals, including the writers Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Neal Cassady. Almost all are affectionate, more or less straightforward portraits made indoors and out. Many have a subtly playful spirit, like one of the poker-faced Burroughs standing next to a stone chimera in the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1953 — “a brother Sphinx,” Ginsberg notes in a caption handwritten on a later print from the original negative. But whatever embarrassing or illicit behavior was going on in Ginsberg’s circle he left off camera.
Soon after taking those pictures, Ginsberg lost the camera he’d been using, and it would be another 20 years before he would return to photography. He put the prints an
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the Late Great Allen Ginsberg - a photo biography
Many of the seminal figures of contemporary culture knew and worked with Allen Ginsberg and have a place in this book. Among them are Cecil Taylor, David Amram, Philip Glass, Ray Manzarek, Ed Sanders, Czeslaw Milosz, Norman Mailer, Robert Frank, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Gregory Corso, William Burroughs, Philip Whalen, Peter Orlovsky, and Robert Creeley. In this book we truly see Allen Ginsberg as a poet, a spiritualist, a friend, a lover, a performer, a teacher, and a lover of good times. A complex and many-faceted life is given its due in this inspired photographic history of Ginsberg’s life from 1980 through 1997. The Late Great Allen Ginsberg is a deeply moving recollection of America’s most important post-World War II poet, informed by Ginsberg’s sensitivity, his love of life, and his humanitarianism. “Allen Ginsberg spent hardly any time alone.” We see
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Renowned poet, world traveler, spiritual seeker, founding member of a major literary movement, champion of human and civil rights, photographer and songwriter, political gadfly, teacher and co-founder of a poetics school. Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) defied simple classification.
Poets are commonly known only within their circles of readerships but like Walt Whitman, Ginsberg’s name was recognizable to millions who had never read so much as a single word of his poetry. Like Whitman, the foundation of Ginsberg’s work was the notion that one’s individual thoughts and experiences resonated among the masses. “It occurs to me that inom am America”, Ginsberg wrote, and while the statement was intended to be humorous, it also illustrated his idea that democracy begins with the raising of a single röst. At the height of his celebrity, Allen Ginsberg was, arguably, as symbolic of amerika — or at least a large segment of the country — as anyone.
As a poet, he will probably be remembered most fo