“. . . dreaming out the window eat my gruel / as ailanthus trees bud & grow thick green, seaweed in rainy Atlantis, / lose leaves after snowfall, sit bare branched in January’s rusty winds? / Snap photographs focus’d on the clothesline, courtyard chimneypots a block away?” See “May Days 1988,” Cosmopolitan Greetings book. Here new buds of May, raindrops on the clothesline, the picture taken four days after poem was written — Lower East Side N.Y. May 7, 1988., 1988

Inscription

signed by artist, lower right on sheet in black ink: Allen Ginsberg; artist inscription, across bottom under image:"…dreaming out the window eat my gruel / as ailanthus trees bud and grow thick green, seaweed in rainy Atlantis / lose leaves after snowfall, sit bare branch'd in January's rusty winds? / Snap photographs focus'd on the clothesline, courtyard chimneypots a block away?" see "May Days 1988," Cosmopolitan Greetings book. Here new buds of May, raindrops on the clothesline, the picture taken four days after poem was written, Lower East Side New York May 7, 1988.

Provenance

Allen Ginsberg Estate; Ellen and Gary Davis, Greenwich, CT (through Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York); gift to NGA, 2009.

Exhibition History

2010

Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg, National Gallery of Art, Washington; National Gallery of Art, Washington; Grey Art Gallery & Study Center, New York University, New York; The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, 2010 - 2013, no. 98.

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