Peter Duffin is an American artist and visual poet working in Valencia, Spain, co-founder with Sam Larson of the letterpress and artists’ books studio Animales de Lorca
Peter’s engagement with Allen’s work goes back to at least 2021 and the project, “Shopping at the Neon Fruit Supermarket”, a portfolio of twenty-eight letterpress prints based on Whitman’s Calamus poems, Garcia Lorca’s “Ode to Walt Whitman“, and Allen‘s “A Supermarket in California”
“Allen Ginsberg, Federico García Lorca, and Walt Whitman represent three generations of gay poets”, he writes, “whose work intertwined across time in myriad ways. Some connections were overt (Ginsberg’s imagining Lorca and Whitman cruising the aisles of a supermarket) and some more poetic (Lorca’s vision of Whitman’s beard being full of butterflies). This series imagines a collaborations between the three poets to create this new a suite of visual poems”.
Intersecting and overprinting are skillfully engaged to create a stunning new work.
More recently, last year, Duffin produced (in an edition of fifteen) a limited-edition book Falling Asleep in America (which was awarded the Premi ArtsLibris award at the 2024 ArtsLibris International Artists’ Book Fair in Barcelona)
“In the book Falling Asleep in America each word of the final line of Allen Ginsberg’s poem by the same name is printed on paper made from a different American material. For example ‘body’ is printed on paper made from 1930s Chicago paper samples, ‘roar’ is printed on paper made from U.S. Air Force uniforms and ‘in’ on paper from Californian seaweed. The very material of the book tells a parallel story to Ginsberg’s poem, reinforcing his poetic travelogue through America. Many of these papers were custom created for this project.”
The papers are cut into the shapes of imagined American ‘states’. The shapes of these ‘states’ follow the roads and rivers of America.
The book comes in a presentation case featuring a re-drawn map of all the ‘states’
“Falling Asleep in America” (the poem) appeared in Allen’s “Fall of America -Poems of These States 1965-1971“
Listen to the musical interpretation on Allen Ginsberg’s The Fall of America: A 50th Anniversary Musical Tribute by Social Animals
We’re in the Great Place, Fable Place, Beulah, Man wedded to Earth, Planet of green Grass
Tiny atomic wheels spin shining, worlds change Heavens inside out, the planet’s reborn in ashes,
Sun lights sparkle on atomic cinder, planets levitate, gree moss precedes trees trembling sentient,
Stone eat blue skies solar dazzle with invisible mouths & flowers are the rocks’ excrement—
Each million years atoms spin myriad reversals, worlds in worlds interchange populations—
from worm to man’s a tiny jump from earth to earth souls are borne ever forgetful—
populations eat their own meat, roses smell sweet in the faeces of horses risen red-fac’d.
Consciousness changes nightly, dreams flower new universes in brainy skulls
Lying in bed body darkened ear of the bus roar running, only the eye flickering grass green returns me to Nashville,
April 1969
We await with interest future Duffin-Ginsberg collaborations.