Peter Orlovsky | |
|---|---|
 Orlovsky (right) with Allen Ginsberg, 1978 | |
| Born | Peter Anton Orlovsky July 8, 1933 New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Died | May 30, 2010 (aged 76) Williston, Vermont, U.S. |
| Resting place | Shambhala Mountain Center, Red Feather Lakes, Colorado, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Columbia University |
| Years active | 1953–2008 |
| Partner | Allen Ginsberg (1954-1997; Ginsberg's death) |
Peter Anton Orlovsky (July 8, 1933 – May 30, 2010) was an American poet and actor. He was the long-time partner of Allen Ginsberg.
Orlovsky was born in the Lower East Side of New York City, the son of Katherine (née Schwarten) and Oleg Orlovsky, a Russian immigrant. [1] He was raised in poverty and was forced to drop out of Newtown High School in his senior year so he could support his impoverished family. After many odd jobs, he began working as an orderly at Creedmoor State Mental Hospital, known today as Creedmoor Psychiatric Center.
In 1953, Orlovsky was drafted into the United States Army for the Korean War at nineteen years old. Army psychiatrists ordered his transfer off the front to work as a medic in a San Francisco hospital. He later went to Columbia University.
He met Allen Ginsberg while working as a model for the painter Robert La Vigne in San Francisco in December 1954. Prior to meeting Ginsberg, Orlovsky had made no deliberate attempts at becoming a poet. [2] Ginsberg was living with his girlfriend Sheila Williams Boucher at the time, but broke off the relationship to be with Orlovsky. Orlovsky also had a sexual relationship with Boucher during this time. Ginsberg and Orlovsky considered their relationship to be a "marriage sealed by vows." It was an open relationship, in part because Orlovsky was bisexual. [3] [4]
With Ginsberg's encouragement, Orlovsky began writing in 1957 while the pair were living in Paris. Accompanied by other beat writers, Orlovsky traveled extensively for several years throughout the Middle East, Northern Africa, India, and Europe. [5] He also helped produce and contributed vocals to Ginsberg's 1970 LP Songs of Innocence and Experience , based on William Blake's poetry collection of the same name. [6] Orlovsky was Ginsberg's lover in an open relationship until Ginsberg's death in 1997. [5]
In 1974, Orlovsky joined the faculty of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, teaching poetry. In 1979 he received a $10,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to continue his creative endeavors.
In May 2010, friends reported that Orlovsky, who had had lung cancer for several months, was moved from his home in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, to the Vermont Respite House in Williston. He died there on May 30, 2010, from complications of the disease; he was 76 years old. He was buried at Shambhala Mountain Center in Red Feather Lakes, Colorado. His epitaph reads: "Train will tug my grave, my breathe hueing gentil vapor between weel & track".
His work has also appeared in The New American Poetry 1945–1960 (1960), The Beatitude Anthology (1965), as well as the literary magazines Yugen and Outsider.
Orlovsky appeared in at least six films: Andy Warhol's Couch (1965), Conrad Rooks's Chappaqua (1966), Stan Brakhage's Thot-Fal'N (1978), and three by Robert Frank. Alongside Ginsberg, he acted in Pull My Daisy (co-directed by Alfred Leslie, 1959), a landmark Beat film written and narrated by Kerouac. In Me and My Brother (1969) he appears with his brother Julius, who had been discharged from Bellevue hospital after treatment for schizophrenia. Orlovsky plays a prominent role in C'est Vrai! (One Hour) an hour-long, one-take video Frank made for French television in 1990.
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Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, sex, multiculturalism, hostility to bureaucracy, and openness to Eastern religions.
Gary Snyder is an American poet, essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist. His early poetry has been associated with the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance and he has been described as the "poet laureate of Deep Ecology". Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the American Book Award. His work, in his various roles, reflects an immersion in both Buddhist spirituality and nature. He has translated literature into English from ancient Chinese and modern Japanese. For many years, Snyder was an academic at the University of California, Davis and for a time served as a member of the California Arts Council.
Pull My Daisy is a 1959 American short film directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, and adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of his play, Beat Generation.
The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-war era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized by Silent Generationers in the 1950s, better known as Beatniks. The central elements of Beat culture are the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of economic materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration.
"Howl", also known as "Howl for Carl Solomon", is a poem written by Allen Ginsberg in 1954–1955 and published in his 1956 collection Howl and Other Poems. The poem is dedicated to Carl Solomon.
Neal Leon Cassady was a major figure of the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the psychedelic and counterculture movements of the 1960s.
Gregory Nunzio Corso was an American poet and a key member of the Beat movement. He was the youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers.
Janine Pommy Vega was an American poet associated with the Beats.
John Clellon Holmes was an American author, poet and professor, best known for his 1952 novel Go. Considered the first "Beat" novel, Go depicted events in his life with his friends Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg. He was often referred to as the "quiet Beat" and was one of Kerouac's closest friends. Holmes also wrote what is considered the definitive jazz novel of the Beat Generation, The Horn.
Desolation Angels is a semi-autobiographical novel written by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac, which makes up part of his Duluoz Legend. It was published in 1965, but was written years earlier, around the time On the Road was in the process of publication. The events described in the novel take place from 1956-1957. Much of the psychological struggle which the novel's protagonist, Jack Duluoz, undergoes in the novel reflects Kerouac's own increasing disenchantment with the Buddhist philosophy. Throughout the novel, Kerouac discusses his disenchantment with fame, and complicated feelings towards the Beat Generation. He also discusses his relationship with his mother and his friends such as Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, Lucienn Carr and William S. Burroughs. The novel is also notable for being an early positive portrayal of homosexuality and homosexual characters, despite its use of words that were at the time considered homophobic slurs.
The City Lights Pocket Poets Series is a series of poetry collections published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights Books of San Francisco since August 1955.
Kirby Doyle, born Stanton Doyle, was an American poet. He was featured in the New American Poetry anthology, with the so-called "third generation" of American modernist poets. He was one of the San Francisco Renaissance poets who laid the groundwork for Beat poetry in San Francisco. Doyle also wrote novels.
Mexico City Blues is a poem published by Jack Kerouac in 1959 composed of 242 "choruses" or stanzas. Written between 1954 and 1957, the poem is the product of Kerouac's spontaneous prose, his Buddhism, and his disappointment at his failure to publish a novel between 1950's The Town and the City and 1957's On the Road.
Beat Generation is a play written by Jack Kerouac upon returning home to Florida after his seminal work On the Road had been published in 1957. Gerald Nicosia, a Kerouac biographer and family friend has said that theatre producer Leo Gavin suggested that Kerouac should write a play; the outcome being Beat Generation.
Reality Sandwiches is a book of poetry by Allen Ginsberg published by City Lights Publishers in 1963. The title comes from one of the included poems, "On Burroughs' Work": "A naked lunch is natural to us,/we eat reality sandwiches." The book is dedicated to friend and fellow Beat poet Gregory Corso. Despite Ginsberg's feeling that this collection was not his most significant, the poems still represent Ginsberg at a peak period of his craft.
Jim Cohn is a poet, poetry activist, and spoken word artist in the United States. He was born in Highland Park, Illinois, in 1953. Early poetics and musical influences include Bob Dylan, the subject of a now lost audiotaped for a class project completed in his senior year at Shaker Heights High School, where he also co-captained the varsity football team. He received a BA from the University of Colorado at Boulder in English (1976) and a Certificate of Poetics (1980) from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University where he was a teaching assistant to Allen Ginsberg. He received his M.S. Ed. in English and Deaf Education from the University of Rochester and the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) in 1986. For over two decades, he worked in the field of disability services, taking a siddha approach as a model of Disability Services and Studies practice and scholarship. He believed that the social sciences should be redefined thematically within the United States into a form of American Karmic Studies.
Howl is a 2010 American film which explores both the 1955 Six Gallery debut and the 1957 obscenity trial of 20th-century American poet Allen Ginsberg's noted poem "Howl". The film is written and directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman and stars James Franco as Ginsberg.
Naked Lens: Beat Cinema is a book by Jack Sargeant about the relationship between Beat culture and underground film. First published by Creation Books in 1997, the book has been subsequently republished in two different English language editions, by Creation Books in 2001 and Soft Skull in 2008. The book also features contributions from Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Stephanie Watson, and Arthur and Corrine Cantrill.
Songs of Innocence and Experience is an album by American beat poet and writer Allen Ginsberg, recorded in 1969. For the recording, Ginsberg sang pieces from 18th-century English poet William Blake's illustrated poetry collection of the same name and set them to a folk-based instrumental idiom, featuring simple melodies and accompaniment performed with a host of jazz musicians. Among the album's contributors were trumpeter Don Cherry, arranger/pianist Bob Dorough, multi-instrumentalist Jon Sholle, drummer Elvin Jones, and Peter Orlovsky – Ginsberg's life-partner and fellow poet – who contributed vocals and helped produce the recording with British underground writer Barry Miles.
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