On August 25, 1975, poet Allen Ginsberg wrote my mom a postcard from Naropa University. My mom showed me the postcard one gloomy winter afternoon in 2021—I didn’t know what Naropa was or how she had met Ginsberg. At Naropa, considered the birthplace of the modern mindfulness movement, Ginsberg founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics with poet Anne Waldman. I obsessed over the words written on the postcard, but I didn’t think about the photo on the front.
Last night, I watched a documentary about photographer Elsa Dorfman, and I learned about her long friendship with Ginsberg. In “Remembering Allen,” she wrote about how they met in 1958 when she was working as a secretary for Grove Press:
I answered the phone. “Hello, Editorial.” I made coffee for the poets and writers Grove published in its Evergreen Review. Allen was one of the poets. He came by the office every day to use our Apeco machine, a precursor of Xerox, which made crinkly orange copies that faded. It was a miracle machine. We hit it off right away. Allen had a zillion ideas and I was willing/eager to work zillions of hours to make them happen. I adored him and was very compliant. Poetry readings in colleges all over the country – A new idea in 1959. Why not? Publishing small editions? -Why not? – I sat on my bed and typed – no electric typewriter back then – four letters to each college in the country. Readings began to happen. When Allen came to Boston he used our house as his headquarters. He made appointments for interviews, gave interviews, made phone calls, got phone calls, brought home boyfriends. Later he would come with explicit dietary instructions – no sugar, no salt, no meet, macrobiotic this and that, rice milk only. I would go to Bread & Circus and scour the isles for the right stuff. Allen would be happy, And at three in the morning, he would wake up and go quietly into the kitchen to eat the peanut butter, the sourdough bread, the stuffed chicken, the real ice-cream. When I became a photographer, in 1965, Allen became a willing subject. He intuitively understood the camera. Pretty soon, photography was part of our ritual of being together. The next thing I knew, Allen and I had been friends for thirty-eight years! How’d it happen? – Well, we each had a knack for friendship, and we each assumed the other would simply always be there…
I love stories like this about the mundane beginnings of a lifetime of creative friendship. Dorfman took some of Ginsberg’s most iconic portraits, including the ones on the postcard he sent to my mom. “I’ve always been into the surfaces of people,” Dorfman said. “I am totally not interested in capturing their souls.” Dorfman, like so many women in the arts, had to scratch and claw and insistently make a path. Reflecting on her career, Dorfman said, “What amazes me is that you just have to wait long enough. Because my work was so rejected and so put down - it adds to the pleasure of people liking it now. For so long, I was at the bottom of the list...but somehow, I just kept plowing along.” If you want to read more about my mom and Ginsberg, you can pick up Artists All Around in 2025.
Keep plowing along,
Alice
Another wonderful journey as I live vicariously through each of the adventures you plow into my path!
❤️
As an old "beat generation man" I am impressed.