[3 articles]
Peter Orlovsky, poet and muse of longtime partner Allen Ginsberg, dies at 76
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/01/AR2010060103524.html
By Emma Brown
June 2, 2010
Peter Orlovsky, 76, a writer best known as a longtime muse,
inspiration and companion of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, died May 30 of
lung cancer at a respite care center in Williston, Vt.
Mr. Orlovsky and Ginsberg were partners for more than 40 years until
Ginsberg's death from liver cancer in 1997. They met in San Francisco
in 1954 and committed to each other in a ceremony held the following year.
"At that instant, we looked into each other's eyes," Ginsberg later
recalled, "and there was a kind of celestial cold fire that crept
over us and blazed up and illuminated the entire cafeteria and made
it an eternal place."
Ginsberg would soon be launched to national attention for the profane
and sexually explicit poem "Howl," for which his publisher was hauled
into court on charges of obscenity. "Howl" helped make Ginsberg a
hero of free-speech advocates, an anti-establishment cultural icon
and the prolific poet laureate of Beat generation writers.
Mr. Orlovsky was credited with sparking Ginsberg's creative impulse.
"Allen needed someone to write to -- whenever he wrote poetry, he was
sort of writing with someone else's ear in mind," said Ginsberg
biographer Bill Morgan. "A lot of times, it was Jack Kerouac; and at
other times, it was Peter Orlovsky."
Encouraged to write by Ginsberg, Mr. Orlovsky became a poet in his
own right. He won a $10,000 grant from the National Endowment for the
Arts in 1979 and published several books, including "Dear Allen, Ship
Will Land Jan. 23, 58" (1971), and a book with Ginsberg called
"Straight Hearts' Delight: Love Poems and Selected Letters" (1980).
Mr. Orlovsky's poems were playful and frank, featuring unusual
spellings and a conversational style. "Peter's poetry does not stand
beside Allen's best work like 'Howl' and 'Kaddish,' but it had its
own goofy, sweet integrity," said Steve Silberman, who came to know
the couple as Ginsberg's apprentice and later as his teaching assistant.
"Morning again, nothing has to be done/maybe buy a piano or make
fudge," reads Mr. Orlovsky's "Second Poem," written in Paris in 1957,
when he and Ginsberg were staying with fellow poets William S.
Burroughs and Gregory Corso at a boarding house known as the Beat Hotel.
Mr. Orlovsky was at the center of the out-on-the-edge Beat-poet
culture, even if only by virtue of his relationship with Ginsberg. In
1959, the two appeared in "Pull My Daisy," a short film directed by
Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie. Based on a real-life episode from the
life of Beat legend Neal Cassady, the film seemed to be an
unrehearsed embodiment of the generation's signature spontaneity.
In 1963, acclaimed fashion photographer Richard Avedon made a
portrait of Ginsberg and Mr. Orlovsky together in the nude. The
picture, circulated widely as a poster in New York's subway system
and elsewhere, was seen by many as a bold validation of
homosexuality. The next year, Mr. Orlovsky was one of many
countercultural figures who appeared in Andy Warhol's film "Couch."
Mr. Orlovsky struggled with drugs and alcohol over the years, and his
relationship with Ginsberg waxed and waned. The couple was not
monogamous -- Mr. Orlovsky was primarily heterosexual, Ginsberg told
the New York Times in 1984, adding that Mr. Orlovsky was at the time
living with a woman he loved.
Nevertheless, when Ginsberg died, Mr. Orlovsky was by his side, and
Ginsberg left Mr. Orlovsky money to buy a home in St. Johnsbury, Vt.,
where he lived until shortly before his death.
Peter Orlovsky was born on July 8, 1933, in New York, one of five
children. His parents separated when he was a teen, and he dropped
out of high school to support himself as an orderly at a mental hospital.
He came to San Francisco as an Army medic in the early 1950s. After
finishing his military service, he became a model for the local
artist Robert LaVigne in 1954. Ginsberg saw a painting of Mr.
Orlovsky and asked to meet him; within months, the two were living together.
The couple traveled widely, including in the late 1950s to North
Africa and Europe. In the early 1960s, they traveled with the poet
Gary Snyder and his wife Joanne Kyger to India, where they developed
a lifelong affinity for meditation.
Mr. Orlovsky joined Mr. Ginsberg in protesting war and nuclear
proliferation. They once demonstrated by meditating together on
railroad tracks leading to the Rocky Flats nuclear facility in
Colorado. Mr. Orlovsky also taught at Naropa University's Jack
Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colo., founded by
Ginsberg and poet Anne Waldman in 1974, and ran the couple's organic
farm in Cherry Hill, N.Y.
Over the years, Mr. Orlovsky helped care for siblings who suffered
from mental illness. His relationship with his brother Julius, who
had been institutionalized, was captured in the 1969 independent film
"Me and My Brother," directed by Frank. A complete list of survivors
could not be confirmed.
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Peter Orlovsky, Poet Allen Ginsberg's Longtime Partner, Dies at 77
http://www.edgeboston.com/index.php?ch=news&sc=&sc2=news&sc3=&id=106462
by Kilian Melloy
Thursday Jun 3, 2010
Peter Orlovsky died May 30 after a battle with lung cancer. He was 76.
Orlovsky was the son of Russian immigrants. He dropped out of school
to support his parents and four siblings, but he went on to write
four volumes of poetry, including 1978's Clean Asshole Poems &
Smiling Vegetable Songs.
For more than four decades, Orlovsky was Allen Ginsburg's life
partner--or, as Ginsberg declared in his Who's Who entry, the two
were married, reported a June 3 obituary for Orlovsky in the U.K.
newspaper The Independent.
Like Ginsberg, Orlovsky was a poet. Orlovsky, too, was associated
with the Beat movement, which included writers such as Jack Kerouac,
Gregory Corso, and Ginsberg himself. But it was as a painter's model
in San Francisco that Orlovsky met Ginsberg in 1954, the Independent
recounted. The two remained together until Ginsberg's death in 1997.
Orlovsky was a primary source for the co-directors of the upcoming
movie Howl. The film's helmers, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman,
wrote in a June 2 Advocate.com article that they had sought out
Orlovsky six years ago. "Peter was the first person we set out to
meet as part of our research," the co-directors wrote. "He was then
living a quiet retired life in a the woods of New England." Orlovsky
told the co-directors that a moonlit walk--during which Orlovsky sang
a rendition of the Hank William's song "Howlin' At the Moon"--may
have been the inspiration for the title of Ginsberg's most famous
poem. "I never asked him, and he never offered," Orlovsky told them,
"but there were things he would pick up on and use in his verse form
some way or another. Poets do it all the time."
The film that bears the same name as Ginsberg's acclaimed poem will
tell the story of the obscenity trial that resulted from Howl's
publication. Actor Aaron Tveit portrays Orlovsky. The film is slated
to open on Sept. 24.
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Peter Orlovsky, Poet and Ginsberg Muse, Dies at 76
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/arts/03orlovsky.html
By BRUCE WEBER
Published: June 2, 2010
Peter Orlovsky, who inspired Beat writers like Allen Ginsberg, with
whom he had a romantic partnership for decades, and who wrote
emotionally naked, loopy and occasionally luminescent poetry of his
own, died in Williston, Vt., on Sunday. He was 76, and lived in St.
Johnsbury, Vt.
The cause was lung cancer, said Charles Lief, Mr. Orlovsky's
guardian. Mr. Orlovsky had diabetes and had struggled with drug and
alcohol addiction for much of his life, Mr. Lief said.
Mr. Orlovsky was just 21, recently discharged from the Army and
working as an artist's model when he met Ginsberg in the San
Francisco studio of the painter Robert LaVigne in December 1954.
The famous story of their meeting, the Ginsberg biographer Bill
Morgan said in an interview, was that Ginsberg saw Mr. LaVigne's
portrait of Mr. Orlovsky and had already fallen in love with the
subject when Mr. Orlovsky walked in.
They moved to a North Beach apartment shortly thereafter, and within
two years Ginsberg had published "Howl and Other Poems", the
jazzed-up song of a vibrant, raucous, alienated American spirit that
established his place in the poetry canon. That work's open
celebration of eroticism and homosexuality caused Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, who published it, to be tried on obscenity charges. (He
was acquitted.)
Ginsberg and Mr. Orlovsky wrote and spoke openly about their
relationship, which they deemed a marriage. Because of Ginsberg's
prominence, the two men were social pioneers, the first gay "married"
couple that many people had ever heard of. They traveled to Paris and
North Africa together and spent two years in India, where they
absorbed the Eastern philosophy that showed up in Ginsberg's poems
and influenced Mr. Orlovsky, who became a Buddhist, for the rest of his life.
Ginsberg and Mr. Orlovsky also lived together on the Lower East Side
of Manhattan and, for a time, on a farm in Cherry Valley in upstate New York.
Like Ginsberg, Mr. Orlovsky became a central figure in the Beat
movement, teaching at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics,
founded by Ginsberg and others in 1974, at the Naropa Institute (now
Naropa University) in Boulder, Colo., and figuring in Kerouac's
books. Kerouac called Mr. Orlovsky George in "The Dharma Bums" and
Simon Darlovsky in "Desolation Angels."
The relationship was not without its problems: both men had other
partners, and Mr. Orlovsky was interested in women as well as men.
But their bond remained until Ginsberg's death in 1997.
It was Ginsberg who encouraged Mr. Orlovsky to write poetry, and
though he published only a few slim volumes, his voice was singular,
and his early work was admired by the likes of William Carlos
Williams and Gregory Corso. It had an outsider-ish originality (the
spelling and phrasing were eccentric), a blunt, innocent earthiness,
especially about bodily functions, and a Whitmanesque exuberance that
communicated glee in the process of making poetry itself.
"A rainbow comes pouring into my window, I am electrified," he began
his first poem, which he titled "Frist Poem," in 1957. It continued:
Songs burst from my breast, all my crying stops, mistory fills the air.
I look for my shues under my bed.
A fat colored woman becomes my mother.
I have no false teeth yet. Suddenly ten children sit on my lap.
I grow a beard in one day.
I drink a hole bottle of wine with my eyes shut.
I draw on paper and I feel I am two again. I want everybody to talk to me.
Peter Anton Orlovsky was born on the Lower East Side on July 8, 1933.
His father, Oleg, was an immigrant from Russia who tried starting
several businesses, including hand-painting and selling neckties.
The family was poor, and both parents descended into alcoholism and
eventually separated. Peter's eldest brother, Julius, who had to be
institutionalized, was a schizophrenic who was intermittently
catatonic. A 1969 film by Robert Frank, "Me and My Brother," told
Julius's story at a time when he was living with his brother and
Ginsberg in Manhattan.
Mr. Orlovsky attended high school in Queens, but he dropped out to
help support his family and worked as an orderly at the Creedmoor
state mental hospital (now Creedmoor Psychiatric Center).
He was drafted in 1953 during the Korean War but, the story goes, was
ordered not to be sent to the Korean front after he told an officer,
"An army with guns is an army against love." Instead he was sent to
San Francisco, where he worked as a medic.
Mr. Orlovsky's books of poems include "Dear Allen, ship will land Jan
23, 58" (1971), "Lepers Cry" (1972) and "Straight Hearts' Delight:
Love Poems and Selected Letters" (with Allen Ginsberg) (1980). In
addition to "Me and My Brother," he appeared in "Couch," a 1964 film
by Andy Warhol and other films by Mr. Frank, including "Pull My Daisy" (1959).
Mr. Orlovsky had a sister, Marie, and three brothers, Lafcadio,
Julius and Nick. Mr. Lief, his guardian, said that he could be
certain only that Mr. Orlovsky is survived by Lafcadio.
.
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