We quoted yesterday from Anne Waldman’s generous foreword to the upcoming Pat Thomas volume – Material Wealth – Mining the Personal Archive of Allen Ginsberg. Today, we feature a couple of paragraphs from Thomas’s informative introduction:
“If Allen had merely saved his own personal ephemera that would be remarkable. However, he kept everything connected to his friends as well… A poster for Patti Smith‘s very first poetry reading. Piles of correspondence from when Allen acted as the literary agent of William S Burroughs, Herbert Huncke, and others. Various Yippie manifestos. A ticket stub for a 1974 concert by Bob Dylan and The Band with Yoko Ono‘s phone number scribbled on the back, Posters documenting early Beat Generation readings in 1950s San Francisco as well as later ones capturing the Haight-Ashbury Hippie era.
Of course Allen’s own remarkable journey is here too. Agreements for BBC Radio appearances, schedules of college lecture tours, early notes for his iconic “Kaddish” poem.
A parody rewrite of “Howl” as “Towel” by Terry Southern . Obsessive letters from fans he never met and a bizarre letter that Allen sent to the American Nazi Party during the
George Lincoln Rockwell era, something about “I heard you wanted to kill me, can we meet and discuss it?”.
There are hundreds of thousands of items carefully stored at Stanford University in its Allen Ginsberg collection. After a period of lengthy research by Peter Hale (of the Ginsberg Estate) and myself, we are pleased to share some of the most interesting items within the one Ginsberg book that has never been done – and needed to be done – a collection of these images!…
Most of the captions contained in this book were written by me but some were the handiwork of Peter Hale, who during Allen’s lifetime was his photo archivist. There are also some quotes from Allen himself, plus there are quotes from dozens of people who knew and loved Allen; those are drawn from several decades worth of diverse sources.
While this isn’t a book of Allen’s photography – that’s been done at least twice before – there are plenty of photos that he did take featured here. He often scribbled has affection for the subject right on the image itself and we’ve occasionally reprinted these instances where it made sense. More importantly, this book is packed with ephemera that you’re never seen, a smorgasbord of things that most of us would have tossed away decades ago: notes to oneself, accounting statements, letters of intent, fan statements, criticisms and critiques, posters of events that didn’t seem historical until later, political manifestos, et al.
So much has already been published about Allen’s relationship with his fellow Beats – especially Jack Kerouac and William S Burroughs – Rather than regurgitate that for the hundredth time, I’ve taken some paths less explored. Allen’s interactions with Bob Dylan. Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman of the Yippies, Paul McCartney, his anti-Vietnam War protests including the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.
But don’t worry, Ginsberg’s pals Jack and Bill along with Gregory Corso, Herbert Huncke, Neal Cassady and others, including Allen’s life partner, Peter Orlovsky, are properly represented…”