Read To A Sunflower For Ginsberg's Birthday

Nobody needs a primer about Allen Ginsberg.  Born June 3, 1926, Ginsberg excited and incited generations with his poetry and politics.  However, today doesn't feel like a day to read Howl.  It's springtime.  I don't know about you but my mind is on rebirth and emergence, planting and growing (I'll be outside all day after I finish writing this).  Instead of Howl, I suggest you read or listen to Ginsberg's Sunflower Sutra.  You can read the complete poem here or listen to Ginsberg read it at the right - or do both at the same time if you wish.

I'm a fan of Ginsberg's photographs.  In the 1950's Ginsberg bought a secondhand Kodak camera, and for the next decade or so he took photos of all his friends.  Those friends, of course, were Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassidy, William Burroughs and Gregory Corso among many others. In the 1980's Ginsberg added captions to the photos.  The National Gallery of Art has a nice slideshow of some of the photos (including the one at the right).  A collection of the captioned photos, Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg was published in 2010.  You can find the book through IndieBound or at your local library.

There's also a terrific essay about the photographs as well as the people in them by the lovely Edmund White over at the New York Review of Books.  If you'd like to learn more or just revisit Ginsberg's life and writing there's no better place than the Allen Ginsberg Project or the aforementioned library.

I love the photograph on the right, the writer at work.  It inspires me.  I hope it might inspire all of you, too.  Write something this week, a poem, a story, even a postcard or a caption on a photo...you never know what it might become.