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Mission
Allen's commitment to exploring his visions alongside his own sensorial perceptions led to the creation of a body of work in nearly every form of media available in his time, a body of work that continues to influence and inspire. The Allen Ginsberg Trust was created to ensure the continuation and availability of that legacy, to manage Allen's tangible and non-tangible assets in a manner consistent with Allen's world-view & sensibilities.
After nearly a decade of activity overseeing the release of materials from the archives, we are no longer technically an Estate Trust, but continue with the same mandate. To reflect this we've renamed this website The Allen Ginsberg Project. The idea of the Allen Ginsberg Project evolved out of our original website for the Ginsberg Trust, started in 2002. "Project" seemed the ideal word to define the site as an ongoing aspiration to approximate Allen's world vision, or better yet, to provide as much of his own words, snapshots and art as the internet could allow and let the items speak for themselves. Given the substantial legacy of text, photos, hand-written documents, and audio and video materials that represent Allen's life-work, this daunting task will no doubt be ongoing beyond the foreseeable future. The internet has evolved by leaps and bounds since 2002, and the amount of user posted materiel increased exponentially. Having been around the materiel as long as some of us have, we can share that experience to help discern degrees of authenticity and help to clarify provenance in cases of discrepancies. We do try to avoid any more claims to defining Allen's vision than anyone else who had spent time with him. It's the access to so much source materiel that compels those of us in his inner circle to break open what there is and let the world in to explore and discover for them selves. So, have at it folks!
History
Ginsberg established the Allen Ginsberg Trust a few years prior to his death to facilitate estate and tax settlement and to continue the work of chronicling Allen’s life.
After Allen died, there were memorials to attend — and plan: The Trust helped to arrange the May 14th, 1998 Planet News gathering to honor Allen’s lifelong commitment to social action. Some 2,500, “musicians, poets and activists who worked with Allen or were influenced by him participated in a three-hour celebration at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan to honor the spirit of his poetry.” (Quote from the NY Times article about the event.) Attending were notables Patti Smith, Natalie Merchant (who sung her song “King of May” that she wrote about Allen), Dave Dellinger, Ed Sanders and the Fugs, Philip Glass and Anne Waldman.
- Bob Rosenthal“Allen taught us to breathe in the poison and breathe it out again as nectar.”
director
the Allen Ginsberg Estate
Today the Trust continues to keep alive the work of Allen’s life, having completed his last book of poetry, “Death and Fame”, edited with tenderness and care and moving next to collect Ginsberg Essays (“Deliberate Prose”, edited by Bill Morgan) and interviews (“Spontaneous Mind”, edited by David Carter). Also published since Allen’s death was a volume of political poetry he was working on when he died (“Poems for The Nation”, edited by Eliot Katz and Andy Clausen).
Plans for a Web site originated in 2000 around the idea of interconnecting the substantial legacy of text, photos, hand-written documents, and audio and video materials that represents Allen’s life-work. One of Ginsberg’s highest callings was to teach and the Web as a medium offers unprecedented ability to disseminate and impart.
“Rainy night on Union Square, full moon. Want more poems? Wait till I'm dead. August 8, 1990 3:30 AM”
— American Sentences
