If our math serves us well, that would make Allen 83 years old today..
Self-portrait on my seventieth birthday in Borsolino hat and black cashmere-silk scarf from Milan & Dublin thornproof tweed suit, Oleg Cassini tie from Goodwill shirt same source, kitchen window mid-day, I stayed home and worked on Selected Poems 1947-95 proofs after returning from Walker Art Center reading- Beat exhibition weekend. Monday, June 3, 1996, NY (c. Allen Ginsberg Estate)
And now, for the annual Kousa Dogwood photo. Following a tradition started in 1975 of planting flowering trees commemorating writers in the garden at St Mark’s Church in New York City’s East Village, friends of the Poetry Project at St Mark’s, planted a Kousa Dogwood tree in memory of Allen. The tree, planted in April 1999, next to similar trees for Ted Berrigan, Michael Scholnick, Frank O’Hara, W.H. Auden, and Paul Blackburn, blooms every year right around his birthday, June 3.
