Ball, Gordon (Ginsberg, Allen)

East Hill Farm: Seasons with Allen Ginsberg

Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2011. First Printing. Softcover. "'This was Allen Ginsberg,' Gordon Ball declared after recounting intimate moments with the cultural icon and beloved Beat Generation poet on East Hill Farm, outside Cherry Valley, New York. During the late 1960s, when peace, drugs, and free love were direct challenges to conventional society, Allen Ginsberg, treasurer of the Committee on Poetry, Inc., funded what he hoped was "a haven for comrades in distress" in rural upstate New York. First described as an uninspiring, dilapidated four-bedroom house with acres of untended land--including the graves of its first residents--East Hill Farm became home to those who sought pastoral enlightenment in the presence of Ginsberg's brilliance and generosity. // A self-declared member of a "ragtag group of urban castoffs," including Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky, Herbert Huncke, and the mythic [Filmmaker] Barbara Rubin, farm manager Ball tended to a nonstop flurry of guests, chores, and emotional outbursts while also making time to sit quietly with Ginsberg and discuss poetry, Kerouac, sex, and America's war in Vietnam. In honest and vivid prose, Ball offers a rare intimate glimpse of the poetic pillar of the Beat Generation as a striving and accessible human being at home on the farm and in the world." (from Back Cover). The author and noted Beat associate, Gordon Ball (b. 1944) was an Insider's Insider, someone who--in his capacity not only as farm manager of Ginsberg's Cherry Valley, NY estate but as traveling companion and chronicler of Allen's world-faring tours in the early 1970s--became something akin to an indispensable Cabinet Member in the Poetry Presidency of his famous friend. If it were not for the excellent bird's-eye blurb-summation, we'd be tempted to quote from the work itself, and do so at length. The work has it all--the lowest of lows and the highest of highs, and the unvarnished humanity of the famous farm's inhabitants will leave the reader stunned. A candor-clad neo-classic of Beat history and scholarship. [ISBN: 978-1-58243-776-7]. Trade-format softcover original: First Edition, with no reference to other editions at copyright page; First Printing, as indicated by number sequence thereon. Book in fine condition with only minor shelf-wear to fine-edges; we would assign to it a "Very Fine" grade if not for a bump-crease present at the bottom right-hand corner on back cover, extending from pg. 399-456 though not affecting text in the slightest; else pristine. Fine. [Item #4925]

Price: $40.00