AG: Peter (Orlovsky) and I went and spent a little time (two hours) with her (Georgia O’Keeffe). She gave us raspberry juice from her own garden. Local particulars. She was really proud of home-grown raspberry-juice, and she had enough raspberries (at the age of ninety-one)  that she could actually offer a gallon of raspberry-juice, which was terrific. It’s like that (William Carlos) Williams poem [“A Poem for Norman Macleod”] – “No bull” – You can do a lot with what’s around if you know what’s there” – I read that, didn’t I? – “The revolution/ … Read More

                                    [Georgia O’Keeffe, Hands, 1918 – Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz] 

AG: (Who here caught Reginald Ray‘s) presentation on Friday. Can you raise your hands? Raise your hands high. Okay, I won’t go  over it again, though I think he gave a very coherent intellectual outline of stages of Buddhist awareness and penetration of mind. If you can, borrow notes or check it out with some classmates.At this point, I want to (with a little last look back), wrap up the… Read More

There are some posts on the Allen Ginsberg Project so fitting they deserve annual  re-publication, this is one of them.  Happy Valentines Day, everyone! Celebrating love today (‘the weight of the world’)  on the Allen Ginsberg Project

[Lawrence Ferlighetti Interviews Allen Ginsberg in London in 1965 – William Shakespeare listens in – Photograph by John “Hoppy” Hopkins]

Notice (last week) of the passing  of London’s ubiquitous counter-cultural hero, John “Hoppy” Hopkins brings us to this little snippet of footage (from the BBC’s current affairs program, Panorama) – footage of a “Legalize Pot” rally (including archival footage of Allen) in 1967, in London’s Hyde Park.Despite the pompous commentary…

Speaking of marijuana, here’s Allen, in New York, on the picket line, pushing for legalization, two years before:  

[Allen Ginsberg – Photograph by Benedict J Fernandez]

Allen’s … Read More

[Woodcutter Gazing at Waterfall (detail) – by Hokusai, ink and colour on paper scroll, (1798), in the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford, California – Courtesy the Stanford University Museum of Art, California, Ikeda  Collection]Student: (Isn’t it true that, in certain novels, in certain prose, you can pick out sentences where the author is  just so perceptive and so..)

AG: Right, you can, you can, in a lot of good writers.  (Jack) Kerouac, particularly, who said details are the life of prose). But you can do it in (Charles) Dickens, you can do it in … Read More

Reginald Ray, on the invitation of Chogyam Trungpa, first full-time faculty member and chair of the Buddhist Studies (later Religious Studies) Department at Naropa Institute/University] 

I’m going down with Tsultrim to Santa Fe this weekend, and we’ll be leaving Friday afternoon. For the Friday afternoon class, I’ve asked the Dean of Faculty, which is Reginald Ray, who specializes in teaching Vajrayana Buddhism to come and take my place and do the formal outline of the  structure of Hinayana, Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism, all in one lesson – sort of the main themes, the main transformations, the main … Read More

[Lama Tsultrim Allione (Tsultrim Kloppenburg)] [and Allen Ginsberg]

AG: We were  doing some sitting. I wonder. We haven’t talked too much about it. I’ve sort of left it up to you to adapt. We did finally get some rugs to make it easier. If you want, you can bring in zafus (if you know what a zafu is – it’s a little round pillow that you can prop yourself under your butt and get a more solid seat) . If there’s any question about sitting, you can ask me sooner or later, or you can always go over to … Read More